Here, two views of the holy scroll (original manuscript of On the Road) that launched a million journeys — enlightening, courageous, maybe foolhardy, but no doubt life-changing. Working in the dark ages before personal computers, Kerouac hacked a fix to accommodate the free-flowing, speed-fueled writing method he adopted for his breakthrough novel, which marked a sharp stylistic departure from his more staid and traditional first book, The Town and the City. He created a long scroll that would feed continuously through his typewriter, allowing for an unceasing flow of improvised words, which, as you can see in the bottom photo, he DID go back and edit afterward. Thanks, Jack.
People in the synthetic biology community have been excited for some time now about the potential of microfluidics to enable and advance their research agendas. Recently, a group composed of researchers from Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and international collaborators demonstrated a new microfluidic sorting device, smaller than an iPod Nano, that analyzes biological reactions 1,000-times faster than conventional state-of-the-art robotic methods. The scientists anticipate that the invention could reduce screening costs by 1 million-fold and make directed evolution — the engineering of custom biological compounds — more commonplace in the lab.
Harvard touts the breakthrough as “a boon for the burgeoning field of synthetic biology,” which would allow, for example, biofuels developers to screen populations of millions of organisms or metabolic pathways to find the most efficient producer of a chemical or fuel. Or scientists could speed up the pace of drug development, identifying promising chemical candidate compounds and then evolving them based upon specific desired properties.
“The high speed of our technique allows us to go through multiple cycles of mutation and screening in a very short time,” says project leader Jeremy Agresti of Harvard. “This is the way evolution works best. The more generations you can get through, the faster you can make progress.”
Harvard’s release includes an embedded animation demonstrating the sorting device in action.
Caption: The microfluidic sorting device removes inactive and unwanted compounds, dumping the drops into a “bad egg” bin, and guides the others into a “keep” container. Specifically, as the drops flow through the channels they eventually encounter a junction (a two-channel fork). The device identifies the desired drops by using a laser focused on the channel before the fork to read a drop’s fluorescence level. The drops with greater intensity of fluorescence (those exhibiting the highest levels of activity) are pulled towards the keep channel by the application of an electrical force, a process known as dielectrophoresis.
Credit: Courtesy of Jeremy Agresti, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Jon Mooalem has a VERY well written story on synthetic biology and iGem in this week’s New York Times Magazine, focusing on the underdog team from City College of San Francisco. (Mooalem also had a great segment on This American Life recently, about the self-storage industry.) Mooalem explains the science reasonably and concisely, and definitely captures the zetigeisty appeal of synthetic bio right now.
Team Cambridge attracts an audience at iGem 2009
If you’re new to this space, and interested in learning more about synthetic biology — think of it as genetic engineering 2.0 — you can search through a year or so’s worth of blog posts here. And definitely check out the terrific Oscillator blog, written by Harvard grad student Christina Agapakis, who also gets a mention in Mooalem’s article.
Wired Science and several other outlets have picked up a story about DARPA research with the apparent aim of alarming without truly informing. Apparently, as part of an announced budget for next year, DARPA — the far-out research wing of the U.S. military — is investing $6 million into a project called BioDesign, whose aim is to create “immortal” engineered “lab-monsters” (what type of organism isn’t specified) that have a built-in virtual “serial number” and an emergency “kill switch.” It’s hard to evaluate what exactly is being proposed, but the tone of the coverage strikes me as drummed-up alarmism.
The blog In Pursuit of Happiness contains the actual excerpt from the budget, and the description there sounds pretty much like many definitions of plain old synthetic biology — “eliminating the randomness of natural evolutionary advancement primarily by advanced genetic engineering and molecular biology technologies to produce the intended biological effect.”
There’s not much truly new here — kill switches and molecular markers already exist, and “increasing resistance to cell death” really just seems to mean creating a biological system that is sustainable. I don’t really think there’s anything to see here, folks. DARPA has been interested in synthetic biology as long as the nascent field has had a name, and in addition to the $6 million for BioDesign, it is investing $20 million into a new synthetic biology program and $7.5 million into “increasing by several decades the speed with which we sequence, analyze and functionally edit cellular genomes.”
A Periclimenes yucatanicus shrimp cleans itself upon its symbiotic host, a Condylactis gigantea anemone, in a gorgeous aquarium installation by Miami-based Morphologic Studios.
From their website: Morphologic is a scientific art endeavor led by marine biologist Colin Foord and designer Jared McKay. With the aquarium as our primary medium, we explore the artistic possibilities of living coral reef organisms in an educational manner. Our laboratory/studio is a state certified aquaculture facility perpetuating marine life within the confines of downtown Miami.
Our installations create fluorescent new worlds with a juxtaposition of urban environments; the city and the reef. Through a variety of multimedia experiences, we provide public and private installations designed to stoke the imagination with a marriage of art and science.
Know what the DIYbio crew is really good at? PR and marketing. This event today and tomorrow at UCLA — “Public Participation in the Age of Big Bio” — has the makings of historic significance, though.
When presented with oat flakes arranged in the pattern of Japanese cities around Tokyo, single-cell slime molds constructed networks of nutrient-channeling tubes that are quite similar to the layout of the Japanese rail system, with a larger number of strong, resilient tunnels connecting centrally located oats. Researchers from Japan and England reported their finding in the January 22 issue of Science [via Wired Science]. They suggest that a new model based on the simple rules of the slime mold’s behavior could help humans design more efficient, adaptable networks. Mark Fricker, a study coauthor, based at the University of Oxford, sees potential applications in designing networks that need to change over time, such as short-range wireless systems of sensors that would provide early warnings of fire or flood, which need to efficiently reroute information quickly when sensors are destroyed. Decentralized, adaptable networks would also be important for soldiers in battlefields or swarms of robots exploring hazardous environments, he suggests.
Plotting optimal routes between a number of points is a classically difficult mathematical and computing problem, the most well-known version of which is the so-called “traveling salesman” problem. Personally, I have a hard time getting my head around the mathematical concepts, but suffice to say: very hard. Attempting to solve this and similar NP-complete problems using biological computers is a growing area of interest among synthetic biologists, with faculty and students at Missouri Western and Davidson Universities taking a leading role in research. Click here for a link to an abstract from the Journal of Biological Engineering, describing how researchers devised a bacterial “computer” to solve the related Hamiltonian Path Problem.
