News, trends, and stories from the synthetic biology industry

Hi all,

Here are some of the stories we’re excited about this week:

Molecule maker Arzeda wants to grow phone screens that won’t scratch. Tulips are just one of nature’s myriad biomanufacturing sites. Has this simple flower evolved the answer to scratch-free, biofriendly phone screens? Molecule maker Arzeda thinks so.

Can synthetic biology inspire the next wave of AI? Computers can beat humans at sophisticated tasks like the game Go, but can they also drive a car, speak languages, play soccer, and perform a myriad of other tasks like humans? Here’s what AI can learn from biology.

The scientist who first showed us the double helix: A personal look at Rosalind Franklin. The woman whose work formed a basis for the Nobel Prize for the structure of DNA has not been appreciated until recently. Rosalind Franklin's legend may not do justice to the compassionate, passionate scientist who brought the world its first true visions of the makeup of all life.

Building the human spinal cord atlas: As single-cell atlases continue to be constructed, the scientific and medical communities are gaining deeper insights on how the body functions. This kind of scientific investment is important and it could yield dramatic returns -- such as novel treatments for neurodegenerative diseases and spinal cord injuries.

Synthetic biology: the inheritance of my generation. In this op/ed, Desiree Ho discusses how the possibility that living things may be mechanical, programmable, and vastly unknowable drives the vision of her career and of the future.

In funding news, congratulations to Ellen Jorgensen who spoke at SynBioBeta this year about Carverr - they just closed a $1.9 million seed funding to create a traceability product where specific combinations of microbes are placed on an agricultural product to act as a microscopic barcode throughout the products’ supply chain journey.

In other funding news - a University of Bristol spin-out company, CytoSeek, has raised £1.1 million to develop cell therapies to treat solid tumors.

A free, open-source collection of enzymes for DNA design is helping scientists around the globe join in the exchange of biotechnology research. Check out the enzyme toolkit developed by Stanford lab to make biotechnology globally accessible.

Cheers,
John

Latest News

LanzaTech moves forward on sustainable aviation scale up in the USA and Japan (Il Bioeconomista)

Creating the protein version of DNA base pairing (Science)

Syngulon and Eppen to develop feed probiotics as an alternative to antibiotics (Business Insider)

Breeding a nonallergenic peanut: We can foresee a day when fear of exposure to peanuts and other allergens is no more (Scientific American)

CELLINK launches new bioinks to further strengthen the company’s bioink portfolio (Press release)

Prokarium to run phase I trial of lead vaccine against enteric fever (Press release)

How to reverse engineer biology (A16Z)

How synthetic biologists could save the Cavendish banana from the brink of collapse (Caltech Letters)

Army project may lead to new class of high-performance materials

New private-public partnership led by Harvard and MIT to accelerate cell and gene therapy

There still aren’t any rules preventing rogue scientists from making gene-edited babies (OneZero)

Manus Bio facility to produce next-generation natural ingredients (Press release)

Pairwise is collaborating with Bayer to use gene editing to solve key challenges in five major row crops (Press release)

Who's hiring?

Head of Fermentation, iMicrobes (Alameda,CA)

Biological Engineer, Seed Fund – Prime Movers Lab (Flexible location)

Chief Executive Officer, IBioIC (United Kingdom)

Program Manager 2, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Emeryville, CA