Bio-Based Ideas

Yes, this!

Last month an interesting article got posted at CBinsights about the current state of synthetic biology that I didn't have time to write about until now. What I really like: Even the superficial overview teaser article is much more comprehensive than my review of companies in the field which actually had a slightly different focus. It is also more up-to-date. Reading the article, I am very excited because there are so many interesting companies to be excited about like for example: Benchling - a company that builds dna managing, and editing software. GAE Enzymes - a company that wants to make enzymes more rapidly Glowee -  a company that wants to make biological lighting Gincko Bioworks -  a microbe design company Twist - a DNA synthesis company One interesting thing was who was not mentioned in the public article: Amyris. I guess this has to do with the fact that Amyris is no longer new and "exciting", but a known quantity. I think this is positive b...

Today's post refers to an inspiring talk by Eric Calvins who talks about programming the biology lab to program biological entities. I'll leave it to the reader to see what the implications of this vision are.

I just watched this documentary created by people at the Wired Magazine. This documentary conveys some of the challenges our world will need to face by 2050 and presents some inspiring approaches to tackling some of these challenges. Interestingly, in the first part, Professor Jay Kiesling gets a few minutes of face time to talk about synthetic biology and its contribution to the transportation energy field. Enjoy!

It's always difficult to talk about what my company is working on, so I rarely do. However, as of late, I am really happy to be able to share some of the things I am excited about. Have a look at this promotional video of Amyris and Darpa. The cool thing: All of those people in the video are real people - not actors or anything. It's sort of amusing and cool to see your friends being featured in this video.

This year, I had the opportunity to attend the Synbiobeta 2013 Conference. Synbiobeta is an organization with the mission of fostering a community, and ecology of people, organizations and companies involved in synthetic biology. The conference was divided up into several sessions. In the next few posts, I will try to summarize what I thought was noteworthy during the meeting. We'll start with session 1.

In this week's blog, I just want to share a 1 hour BBC documentary that I happened across on YouTube. For the general audience, I think this is a great video to watch. I also learned something new watching this. Get some popcorn. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the documentary!