Heidelberg’s Ring of Fire with Dr. Roland Eils
The Heidelberg iGEM team was this year’s Grand Prize Winner at iGEM, a premier undergraduate synthetic biology competition held annually in Boston. Dr. Roland Eils, the team’s advisor, spoke about his...
View ArticleBeautiful Biotechnology: Color-Changing Flowers
Ever deliberated over planting the red Dahlias there, the purple Hydrangeas there, or the pink Chrysanthemums here? Well, sooner than you might think, you could have all of the colors you want, all in...
View ArticleImplementing Foreign Quorum Sensing Systems into E. Coli with Galen Gao
When he isn’t splitting his time between classes, water polo and planning Hogwart’s styled theme parties Galen Gao, a junior at Caltech, makes time to conduct synthetic biology research and has just...
View ArticleProfessor King Chow: How to Transform your Students
King Chow, a professor of Life Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and developmental biologist at heart, became interested in synthetic biology fifteen years ago as...
View ArticleBiotechnology and Energy Production: Curbing Flaring Costs
Flaring is a practice widely used by energy producers in which excess natural gas is ignited. This occurs because producers do not have the infrastructure to handle the amount of gas rushing out of gas...
View ArticleDNA Can Survive in Outer Space
If you recently watched Prometheus and got worried about that weird black goo making it back to earth, buckle your seat belts because it might be possible! Scientists have discovered that...
View ArticleUCSF-UCB iGEM Team: The Importance of Collaboration
A majority of iGEM teams consists of undergraduate and graduate students yet one team equips themselves with high school students and has no trouble competing. This year the UC-San Francisco,...
View ArticleEnzymes Created from XNA
It’s hard to imagine what life on other planets looks like. When you watch Star Wars and see strange looking aliens it is unbelievable that beings so different from us could actually exist, yet a...
View ArticleThe iGEM Experience with Dr. Oliver Medvedik
Dr. Oliver Medvedik is the head instructor of Cooper Union’s 2014 iGEM team. He is also a co-founder of Genspace, a community lab in Brooklyn. This year, Cooper Union’s iGEM team worked on a project...
View ArticleGenetics Determine Efficacy of Flu Vaccines
It’s the middle of the flu season, and those of us who haven’t gotten our shots might be regretting it right about now. But turns out, flu shots work for some better than others, and all of that is...
View ArticleSNAIL Gene Responsible for Aggressive Cancer Cells
Scientists at Georgia Institute recently published a study on the way cancer cells spread which may give the scientific community insights on how to treat aggressive forms of cancer. The team isolated...
View ArticleCreating the Perfect Christmas Tree
Ever spent hours looking for that perfect Christmas tree? Despite the careful choosing, sometimes our tree ends up drying up and losing its needles too early, begging the question of whether it was...
View ArticleBacteria Factories
A new study conducted at the Wyss institute at Harvard has discovered a way to design bacteria cells to produce specific types and amounts of chemicals by modifying a bacteria’s genome. This study...
View ArticleEntrepreneurship in Biotechnology with Indie Bio’s Arvind Gupta
Arvind Gupta is one of the co-founders at Indie Bio, the world’s first Synthetic Biology accelerator. Established this September by SOSventures, Indie Bio is an accelerator program designed to support...
View ArticleVector NTI Vs Genome Compiler
By Yael Lederman Everyday, biologists seek simple answers to life’s most complex questions. But getting from point A to point B can be a painstaking process. Software, a way to organize the chaos into...
View ArticleThe future is here, literally for the making: A comparison of SnapGene Vs....
From the first days of unlocking the DNA code, to today synthesizing our own, the past few decades have seen exponential advancements in how we do genetic research. This transformation is owed much to...
View ArticleCloning: Breaking it down
The science community has long employed cloning techniques to help replicate and analyse specific genes and DNA sequences in focus. Over the past few decades molecular biologists have developed...
View ArticleRestriction Ligation Cloning Course
Learn how to perform a restriction ligation cloning experiment, using digest & ligate or PCR and how to design your cloning experiment.
View ArticlePairwise Alignment Course
Learn how to perform a Pairwise Alignment (sequence alignment) in order to verify the integrity of your designed DNA sequences. Aligning sequencing data to your template confirms the DNA you have...
View ArticleHow to choose the perfect vector for your molecular biology experiment
Selecting the right vector for your molecular biology experiment is fundamental to ensure the experiment’s success. There are many elements to consider when choosing which vector backbone to use. To...
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