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iGEM Symposium Day on Synthetic Biology, Cell Systems and Ethics in Biochemistry

Details

PROGRAM

Speakers

Sebastian Maerkl, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, The Laboratory of Biological Network Characterization (LBNC)
Sebastian Maerkl's lab conducts research at the interface of engineering and biology and is active in the areas of systems biology, synthetic biology and molecular diagnostics. They are driven by the desire to learn how to rationally design and engineer biological systems. Sebastian Maerkl’s research aims to develop new microfluidic technologies and apply them to solve biological problems. His rare expertise allows him to combine the design of new tools with advanced research in biology. Sebastian Maerkl is internationally recognized for his many outstanding contributions. Particularly in combining synthetic biology and computational systems with microfluidics, he demonstrated that the expression of genes in vivo can be provided based on the binding energy profiles in vitro. His studies will focus on five areas: the bioengineering of biosystems, the engineering of transcriptional regulatory networks, the engineering of genes and genomes, the engineering of biological systems de novo and the development of a new generation of diagnostic devices.

Victor Dillard, Chief Operating Officer & Founder, Desktop Genetics
Victor obtained his masters in chemical engineering with honours at Imperial College London before completing a specialist biotechnology and business masters with distinction at the University of Cambridge. Since graduating, Victor founded Desktop Genetics with a vision to change modern biotech R&D and enable rapid and accurate end-to-end genome engineering experiments through their proprietary software platform. Within two years of founding Desktop Genetics, Victor has raised over $600,000 of private equity and grant financing, and delivered over $400,000 of revenue. Today, Victor heads the company's business development and operations and is leading the product and technology expansion into CRISPR and genome editing.

Vera van Noort, Center for Microbial and Plant Genetics
The research group led by Vera van Noort is interested in understanding biological systems as a whole. They try to achieve this through computational analysis of large-scale data generated by the ever growing number of new technologies that can systematically measure the behaviour of multiple cellular components, such as biochemical activities, biophysical properties, subcellular localization and interaction. They use and develop new methods to integrate, visualize and query the large amounts of information available and in such a way come to new biological discoveries. A particular focus of the group is proteomics and post-translational modifications.

Yves Peeters, Laboratory of Biochemistry, Molecular and Structural Biology
After completing his master thesis at KU Leuven, Yves obtained an IWT fellowship for his PhD work in the field of synthetic biology. His primary interest goes to DNA polymerases and their modifications towards creation of artificial nucleic acids.

Event summary

For the symposium, we invited and welcomed academic staff, students, sponsors and iGEM supporters. About eighty people were present.

Home speaker Vera van Noort talked about the lessons from systems biology of a minimal organism for synthetic biology. In the EMBL where she worked, they wanted to completely describe one organism. They worked on Mycoplasma pneumoniae. To understand it completely, they studied three different levels:
The metabolism, transcription (regulation) and protein complexes. The take-home lessons for synthetic biology in short: transcription regulation is more than operons and transcription factors, enzymes can catalyse multiple reactions and are organized in multi-subunit complexes, proteins can be part of multiple complexes and can be regulated by post-translational modifications and small peptides are essential.
Victor Dillard, the first keynote speaker, is the founder of Desktop Genetics. The company is building software for biologists, with a focus on synthetic biology. The software helps to improve the efficiency and to lower the costs. He explained that genome editing remains hard and became a design and software challenge, and not purely biological challenge. This is because genome editing needs to be accurate, precise, effective and rapid.
Sebastian Maerkl, the second keynote speaker, discussed the topic cell-free synthetic biology. He explained that microfluidics with cell-free lysate can be used for rapid prototyping of biological systems. One of the advantages is that it has defined and controllable reaction conditions. In vitro prototyping is used to speed up research in synthetic biology. The pipeline of cell-free synthetic biology: design a biological circuit, build the circuit, test parts and circuits, characterize working circuits, clone and implement in vivo.
The second home speaker, Yves Peeters, gave a talk about directed evolution of polymerases using synthetic biology methods. The research of Yves Peeters is part of the research domain Xenobiology, creating alternative life, one of the approaches of synthetic biology. XNA, also called orthogonal DNA, is designed by several labs using different strategies. Making organisms with XNA will be an ultimate biosafety tool for synthetic biology. Before being able to have a liveable organism that uses XNA, there is a need for polymerases recognizing the specific XNA. To create the wanted polymerases, Yves uses directed evolution, including mutagenesis, screening, amplification and iteration of the most active enzymes.