News digest #252 – iGEM teams find success with lab automation and cell-free expression, tips for building your biotech startup team (12/5/2018)

Hi all,

Synthetic biology is about to close out a record year, and 2019 promises to be even bigger. Are you hiring? We have a recruitment promotion on right now, if you email us your job postings before noon on Friday then we’ll post them for free on our jobs website, and also post one job in our upcoming digest. We also have a great deal on half price job postings for 2019 if you sign up before December 31st. And to help you find the right candidates, we asked Richard Herbert of Helix Recruiting to share his hiring advice for startups building their teams.

As a reminder, early bird pricing for SynBioBeta 2019 is ending next week on December 15th.

Congratulations to Amyris who launched a new sweetener with Camil Alimentos and Givaudan this week – the new launch could generate revenue of more than $200 million.

This year’s iGEM Jamboree featured some extraordinary student projects. Teams have built billion-dollar companies starting with banana-scented bacteria, and gone from iGEM project to clinical trials in just seven years. This week, we have two stories of how technology advances are enabling teams and start-ups alike to go farther, faster, and at greater scale. (iGEM just announced the creation of the Thomas F. Knight Matching Fund).

Team Marburg, winner in the overgrad division, credits much of their success in developing a new bacterial chassis organism to the lab automation made possible by the OT-2 pipetting robot, donated by Opentrons. SynBioBeta’s Embriette Hyde talked with the team and has the story of their amazing accomplishment.

Team Marburg won the grand prize in the overgrad division at the 2018 Giant Jamboree for their project, VibriGens.

Other iGEM teams showed how cell-free systems are becoming increasingly important in synthetic biology for screening assays, protein engineering, and constructing gene circuits. Arbor Biosciences supported seven teams from around the world with its cell-free expression technology. Read our article to learn about the range of accomplishments made possible with this new toolkit.

Paris Bettencourt’s 2018 iGEM project used cell-free expression as a tool to help French pig farmers combat antibiotic resistance.

I hope you have a great week!
John

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