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.

Ceviche and tacos, Urge Taquito, Tulum

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.

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.”

‘Cleaner’ from MORPHOLOGIC on Vimeo.

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.

Thoughtware.TV - Fascinated with Synthetic Biology

*This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

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.

Plus, bonus video for the obscure title reference of this blog post. Morrissey forever!