MIT, BU team builds viruses to combat harmful 'biofilms'

bianjie submitted, created time 1 year 5 months (web.mit.edu)

In one of the first potential applications of synthetic biology, an emerging field that aims to design and build useful biomolecular systems, researchers from MIT and Boston University are engineering viruses to attack and destroy the surface "biofilms" that harbor harmful bacteria in the body and on industrial and medical devices.

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Scientists take step to making synthetic lif

Reviver submitted, created time 1 year 6 months (www.reutershealth.com)

Scientists have taken a first step toward making synthetic life by transferring genetic material from one bacterium into another, transforming the second microbe into a copy of the first.

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Royal Society To Expand Work Into Synthetic Biology

gh0706 submitted, created time 1 year 6 months (www.medicalnewstoday.com)

The Royal Society - the UK national academy of science - is seeking views on the direction of new policy work it is planning to undertake in the emerging area of synthetic biology . The Society is keen to receive comments and suggestions on a wide range of issues relating to synthetic biology including its regulation, intellectual property rights issues and biosafety concerns. It is also keen to encourage a wider debate about any potential social, ethical and legal implications that may arise from this broad field of science

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Deterministic characterization of stochastic genetic circuits

addict submitted, created time 1 year 8 months (www.pnas.org)

For cellular biochemical reaction systems where the numbers of molecules is small, significant noise is associated with chemical reaction events. This molecular noise can give rise to behavior that is very different from the predictions of deterministic rate equation models. Unfortunately, there are few analytic methods for examining the qualitative behavior of stochastic systems. Here we describe such a method that extends deterministic analysis to include leading-order corrections due to the molecular noise.

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