SynBERC is sponsoring the first SynBiOSIS (Synthetic Biology Ownership, Sharing & Innovation Symposium) to be held at Stanford University on January 27-28, 2012. Participants will comprise a collection of leading experts in intellectual property law and representatives from across various institutions who are facing property rights challenges in the development of tools and applications of synthetic biology.

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Dow Agrosciences Summer R&D Intern Program (posted 10-21-2011)

SynBERC investigators Drew Endy and Vivek Mutalik represented the SynBERC BIOFAB: International Open Facility Advancing Biotechnology at the BIO Pacific Rim Summit on December 12, 2010 in Honolulu, Hawaii. The very specialized workshop on advancements in synthetic biology was open to all attendees of the large annual meeting focused on Industrial Biotechnology and Bioenergy.

The Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC) is a multi-institution research effort to lay the foundation for the emerging field of synthetic biology. SynBERC’s vision is to catalyze biology as an engineering discipline by developing the foundational understanding and technologies to allow researchers to design and build standardized, integrated biological systems to accomplish many particular tasks.

The Yeast Synthetic Biology Workshop took place on Saturday October 16, 2010 at UC San Francisco's Genentech Hall. Generously supported by Life Technologies, this one-day workshop was in response to a growing recognition that yeast is re-emerging as an important workhorse system in synthetic biology research-development-production processes, in particular for chemical production and biofuels applications.

With seed money from the National Science Foundation (NSF), SynBERC bioengineers from the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University are ramping up efforts to characterize the thousands of control elements critical to the engineering of microbes, so that eventually researchers can mix and match these "DNA parts" in synthetic organisms to produce new drugs, fuels or chemicals.

Graduate students Jeffrey Dietrich, Howard Chou, and Eric Steen from the Keasling lab, as well as Angela Won from the Lim lab, participated in the 2009 Idea to IPO class offered by the Center for BioEntrepreneurship at the University of California San Francisco.

SynBERC, Life Technologies and other SynBERC Industrial Partners have tentatively planned a workshop on Yeast Synthetic Biology Tools. The workshop, tentatively scheduled for November 14 at UCSF’s Mission Bay Campus, arose from conversations among several SynBERC and IAB members over the past several months around a common interest in yeast synthetic biology tools development and application.

Work is beginning on an industry-inspired testbed that aims to construct an advanced fermentation organism. Led by Chris Voigt, the new testbed aims to apply research from the SynBERC thrusts (parts, devices, chassis) to the construction of a “smart” strain that can be programmed to sense and respond to conditions encountered during a fermentation. The focus will be on the construction of a generic system that is applicable to many potential pathways. E. coli has been chosen as the model system because of the availability of platform parts/devices and genome replacement tools.