Event Detail
Session: 36:SPECIAL SESSION: Synthetic Biology: An Emerging Discipline with New Engineering Rules and Design Tools
Type: Special Session
Track: New and Emerging Technologies
Day:
Thursday
Time: 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Room: 6B
Chair: Ion Mandoui - Univ. of Connecticut
36.1 Synthetic Biology: From Bacteria to Stem Cells, R. Weiss - Princeton
36.2 Engineering Synthetic Killer Circuits in Bacteria, L. You - Duke Univ.
36.3 Programming Living Cells to Function as Massively Parallel Computers, J. Tabor - UC
36.4 Synthesizing Stochasticity in Biochemical Systems, Brian Fett - Univ. of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN
Jehoshua Bruck - California Institute of Tech., Pasadena, CA
(speaker)Marc D. Riedel, - Univ. of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN
Abstract: With recent advances in our understanding of cellular processes and improvements in DNA synthesis methods, we can now regard cells as "programmable matter." Through genetic engineering, we are equipping cells with new sophisticated capabilities for gene regulation, information processing, and communication. These new capabilities serve as catalysts for Synthetic Biology, an emerging engineering discipline to program cell behaviors as easily as we program computers. Synthetic biology will improve our quantitative understanding of natural biological processes and will also have biotechnology applications in areas such as biosensing, synthesis of pharmaceutical products, molecular fabrication of biomaterials and nanostructures, and tissue engineering. Recent projects have demonstrated the capability to build a variety of basic biological devices and circuits, such as a toggle switch, oscillator, inverter cascade, signal amplification, and multicellular pattern formation. One of the main challenges facing synthetic biology now is the transition from the fabrication of small prototype circuits to large, sophisticated circuits containing tens or perhaps hundreds of interacting devices. Other challenges include the implementation of applications that utilize the capabilities of synthetic biology and the ability to coordinate the behavior of synthetic multicellular systems. To overcome these challenges requires the development of appropriate computer aided design tools and experimental validation. In this session, we propose to discuss the current state-of-the-art in synthetic biology and address the challenges as we move forward towards foundational technology for highly complex systems and applications.
