The morning of day 2 of SynBioBeta London 2017 was focused on how communication of the science behind many synbio innovations was holding back the progress in the field. British author, journalist and environmental activist Mark Lynas addressed this with regards to the stalemate in agriculture with adoption of GMO foods in a fireside chat with Joyce Tait from the Innogen Institute in Edinburgh. As a former anti-GMO activist himself, Mark argued it was partly because of such heavy regulations that misunderstandings over the safety of GM crops can arise."We were the people destroying GM crops back in the 90s. Changing my mind was a very unpleasant process,” he said. But perhaps Brexit will allow the UK an opportunity to break away from some of this cumbersome framework, Joyce offered.It’s like how Drew Endy, founder of the BioBricks Foundation, put it on day 1: "what we need is a qualitative cultural change in synthetic biology policy", and the basis for this is more effective communication from the scientists themselves.

Getting the wording right

This was echoed by Joanna Dupont from EuropaBio, citing the power of social media: “We should tell the stories of the people behind these technologies - everybody in this room should have a twitter account!”However, a key point of where a high volume of communication can end up being more damaging is misinterpretation of buzz words in the field, leading to a fundamental misunderstanding of a science that can be very complex.As Stephan Herrera of Evolva, and former journalist for publications such as Nature Biotechnology and Forbes, said “Synthetic is a synonym for fake, and since we live in era of fake news, data, expertise, it’s hard to be in a ‘synthetic’ community.”“So we need to equip young scientists with ability to communicate with investors, lawmakers and media,” said panellist Elsa Sotiriadis, Programme Director of the startup bio-accelerator RebelBio (formerly IndieBio EU).

Greenovation

Next was a couple of series of talks on some of the industry’s most exciting green technologies that have been emerging.For example, as part of the circular economy session, LignoCity’s Per Tomani updated us on the Swedish cluster’s efforts to engineer a forest-based bioeconomy from companies working with lignin.Also presenting was Sandra Rey, co-founder of the fiercely popular startup Glowee, which is working on a futuristic bioluminescent lighting for cities, as an alternative source to electricity.In a bid to move away from petrochemical products, biobased textiles are also hugely lucrative at the moment, with major commercial interest to include designers for apparel, medtech and even biodefensive ‘armour’."We can look at nature as a repository of ingredients, or as a coauthor of design,” said Natsai Chieza, founder and creative director of London's microbe wielding design studio Faber Futures.However, Joanne Channon from Cambridge Consultants said that although there is an ongoing biobased revolution, for high quality scale up synbio textile manufacturers still need "new tools, processes and platforms to accelerate the design-build-test-cycle”.

Opening up tools of the trade

One example is the Molecular Storage System (MoSS) by Helixworks, which co-founder Nimesh Pinnamaneni explained uses robotics for end-to-end automation of DNA synthesis.Following Helixworks, which was a startup which graduated from the IndieBio EU class of 2016 (RebelBio), the programme director of SOSV sister accelerator IndieBio in San Francisco, Ryan Bethencourt, also joined the engineering biology for consumer products session.Ryan also had a lot to say on the future of lab-grown meat business, including how regulators don’t quite yet know how to manage this food frontier either… As iGEM alumnus and co-inventor of the Bento Lab, Bethan Wolfenden put it: "we have a huge opportunity for decentralised innovation.”And it is this democratization of synthetic biology which is opening up the lab to a fast paced, and exciting bio-based economy.A full length breakdown of industry announcements and the discussion at SynBioBeta London 2017 will be made available to you next week.