Lifeboat Foundation

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BMI implant leveraging AI.

You probably clicked on this article because the idea of using brain implants to allow artificial intelligence (AI) to read your brain sounds futuristic and fascinating. It is fascinating, but it’s not as futuristic as you might think. Before we start talking about brain implants and how to augment the human brain using AI, we need to put some context around human intelligence and why we might want to tinker with it.

Continue reading “Brain Implants that Augment the Human Brain Using AI” »

I have been evangelizing this for a while and glad to see others chiming in.

London, Nov 26 (IANS) Researchers have engineered cells with a “built-in genetic circuit” that produces a molecule that impairs the ability of cancer cells to survive and grow in their low oxygen environment.

The genetic circuit produces the machinery necessary for the production of a compound that inhibits a protein which has a significant and critical role in the growth and survival of tumours.

Continue reading “Human cells with ‘built-in circuit’ can kill cancer cells” »

A synthetic metabolic pathway developed by Tobias Erb and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg converts CO₂ from the atmosphere into organic matter more efficiently than plants are able to through photosynthesis. We asked the researcher what significance this process could have for climate protection, discussed the hurdles the research team had to overcome to achieve their goal, and looked at the new perspectives that synthetic biology opens up.

Does the synthetic metabolic pathway that fixes CO₂ now represent an effective means of curbing climate change?

Firstly, we are aiming to understand the fundamental biological and chemical principles of how CO₂ in gaseous form can be converted into organic molecules. Our primary motivation is not stopping climate change. We are seeking to develop atmospheric CO₂ as a source of carbon for the future using biological methods. Producing a CO2-neutral process or even one that removes CO₂ from the atmosphere and has a positive impact on the climate would be a fantastic secondary effect.

Continue reading “Biologist discusses a synthetic metabolic pathway that fixes carbon dioxide and synthetic biology” »

WASHINGTON – Scientists believe genetic engineering experiments have the potential to wipe out malaria and other illnesses that kill millions of people every year.

But they also acknowledge they could have unintended consequences that could be catastrophic.

So, over the next four years, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, dubbed DARPA, plans to develop a cleanup crew for engineered genes deemed harmful to the eco-system.

We’re only starting in this space.

Synthetic Biology (SynBio) includes a large field of applications. Within this area biochemists combine engineering concepts and techniques with biology to design new genes that produce a specific protein. When this protein is an enzyme, bacteria and yeast in which such a gene is implanted can produce specific chemicals through a fermentation process. A large and growing number of businesses is active in this field. This became apparent once again at the EFIB-conference in Glasgow, last October. The workshop was chaired by John Cumbers, founder of the American SynBioBeta, an internet-site dedicated to sharing information and news on synthetic biology.

JBEI researchers develop efficient and affordable method for plant DNA assembly.

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) in collaboration with Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Genomics & Systems Biology Division and the DOE Joint Genome Institute developed a versatile system (named jStack) which utilizes yeast homologous recombination to efficiently assemble DNA into plant transformation vectors. The new approach will impact plant engineering for the bioenergy, agricultural and pharmaceutical industries.

Although synthetic biology has provided solutions to many societal challenges, little research has been devoted to advancing synthetic biology in plants. Microbes, such as yeast and Escherichia coli (E. coli), have received much of the attention in developing synthetic biology tools due to their fast generation time and the ease of working with these organisms in laboratories. A shortage of characterized DNA parts, along with the difficulty of efficiently assembling multiple and large fragments of DNA into plant transformation vectors, has limited progress in studying and engineering plants to the same degree as their microbial counterparts.

BENGALURU: After working for five years, a team of three from department of Biosciences and Bioengineering (BSBE) at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay and IITB-Monash Research Academy has designed smart amyloid based hydrogels that are able to guide stem cell to differentiate to neuron and successfully transplanted these stem cells in the brain of Parkinson’s disease (PD) animal models with unique amyloid hydrogels.

In Brief

• Researchers have discovered that placing synthetic genetic circuits in liposomes prevents them from interfering with one another, while still allowing them to communicate.
• Not only could this new form of “modular” genetic circuits lead to more complex engineered circuits, it could also provide insight as to how the earliest life on Earth formed.

By applying engineering principles to biology, researchers can create biological systems that don’t exist naturally. A problem of synthetic biology, however, is that these engineered genetic circuits can interfere with each other. While beneficial on their own, some of these man-made circuits become useless when they come in contact with each other, and this bars them from being used to solve complex biological problems.

Continue reading “Researchers Just Solved One of the Biggest Problems in Synthetic Biology” »

An Obama advisory group warns that advances in gene engineering have outpaced our ability to contain them.