Bio-Based Ideas

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.

Here is another video from TED (did I mention that I love TED talks?) that talks about space requirements of renewable energy sources, and the 6 levers we have to get off 90% use of fossil energy use.

As of late, Amyris has been in the news quite a bit. Another article surfaced in the Washington Post just a few days later titled "Companies rush to build ‘bio-factories’ for medicines, flavorings and fuels" . For the most part, the article echoes the content found in the New York times article. However, I wanted to emphasize the following bits:

It's not often that I get to talk about what is actually happening at my own company which in many ways makes posting about what I really care about even harder. But as it turns out, today, I don't actually need to say much about all the exciting science, and development going on at Amyris. I don't have to because a New York Times article recently talking about all the great things happening at Amyris - with some things being more speculative than others. The article did such a good job explaining in layman's terms what it is that Amyris is doing, that I am just going to link the article to this blog article and call it "In Other Words". I recommend everyone reading this: What's that smell. Exotic Scents Made From Re-engineered Yeast

It's great to hear how people are thinking about using supply chains to have a positive impact on the environment. This is just great! I will let him speak.

Computational sciences at the interface of a hard science are gaining in importance as shown by the recent Nobel Price in chemistry awarded this year. I also recently read two more commentaries that appeared in Nature and Nature Biotechnology that I found interesting.

Quick note to myself: Yesterday was a great day! The 2013 Nobel Prize was awarded to three professors: Professor Martin Karplus, of the University and Strasbourg and Havard University , professor Michael Levitt, of Stanford University, and professor Arieh Warshel, of the University of Southern California. This is great for several reasons: Firstly, USC is my Alma mater. USC now has 4 Nobel Prize holders over its life time and two over just the last 20 or so years! So go Trojans! Secondly, this is the first time I am aware of that a Nobel Prize went to a computational science related field for being able to merge quantum- and Newtonian-physics model into one coherent computer model enabling researchers to understand how chemical reactions happen in molecules of different complexities. I think this underlines the increasing importance that computers play in solving increasingly complicated problems.