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Notes, thoughts, and news on synthetic biology by Christina Agapakis.
Category: research
Last month I wrote about my friend Devin Burrill's paper about synthetic memory in yeast cells. There were a lot of really interesting questions left in the comments, and I asked Devin if she would write a guest post to...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 3:06 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: evolution
The story behind the story of my new PLoS ONE paper, "Towards a Synthetic Chloroplast."
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 5:00 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: friends
Cells permanently change their behavior in response to temporary changes to the environment, a kind of biological memory that controls processes as important and complex as how stem cells differentiate into specific tissues or how the immune system "remembers" dangerous...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 3:21 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: bacteria
cooperation + metabolism + hydrogen + electricity + evolution = AWESOME
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 10:22 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: medicine
Evolution connects all living things on earth, from the arsenic tolerant bacteria in the news this week to the human scientists and bloggers chatting about it. Eyes are intricately complex structures made up of many many cells, but even single-celled...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 4:36 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: social studies
Nick pointed me to a fabulous podcast series by CBC radio called "How To Think About Science." Each episode is a long and fascinating interview with a prominent scholar of science--scientists, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, and historians who explore how science...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 2:12 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: video
It's not just Scott Kern who thinks that science is only about tedious benchwork and that grad students should be boring robots moving small volumes of liquid around 20 hours a day for the greater good. An unscientific analysis of...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 11:42 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: olfaction
So I was browsing the internet for info on G-protein coupled receptors and ended up finding some interesting facts about sperm. It turns out sperm don't just swim blindly, hoping to randomly bump into eggs. Instead, like bacteria, sperm can...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 9:54 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: evolution
Noise obscures meaningful information. Noise is what ruins your carefully designed synthetic biology gene circuit. But noise is part of life and life, it turns out, needs noise. There's a terrific review article in this week's Nature discussing recent...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 9:48 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: cyborg
A lot of synthetic biology is about getting biology to be more like electrical engineering, designing genetic "logic gates" to create a living circuit board. Beyond analogies, however, cells have many fascinating electrical properties--proteins that transfer electrons like wires, membranes...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 10:27 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
