SynBioBeta is pleased to announce that Dr. Daniel Gibson of Synthetic Genomics, Inc. (SGI) and the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) will be serving as the keynote speaker at the upcoming SynBioBeta conference in San Francisco. Dr. Gibson is the leading inventor of Gibson Assembly, which has revolutionized the field of synthetic biology by enabling the assembly of very long DNA constructs.The development of Gibson Assembly emerged from Dr. Gibson and other researchers’ efforts at the J. Craig Venter Institute to build the first synthetic cell. That goal was reached in 2010, with the Gibson Assembly technique being vitally important to the production of the 1.08 million base pairs comprising that cell’s genome. Gibson Assembly has continued to facilitate further iterations of the synthetic organism, including a minimal bacterial cell with a genome of just 531,560 base pairs that was announced by JCVI earlier this year. Since its invention, Gibson Assembly has been commercialized and pervaded the world of synthetic biology far beyond SGI and JCVI. It has enabled applications and achievements beyond the scope of what was previously thought possible.

Today the namesake of this revolutionary technology is an Associate Professor in the Synthetic Biology group at the JCVI. He received a Bachelor’s degree in Biological Sciences from the State University of New York at Buffalo and his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of Southern California before taking up post-doctoral research at the JCVI, where he has since remained.SynBioBeta is looking forward to welcoming Dr. Gibson. Be sure to check out SynBioBeta SF 2016 - Fuel Your Passion for Engineering Biology, October 4th - 6th at the South San Francisco Conference Center.