#synthetic-biology

#synthetic-biology

"Craig was not only an extraordinarily innovative scientist. He also willed important ideas forward into reality and practice. The more I understand how difficult it is to cause actually new things to happen the more I am in awe of what Craig was able to accomplish."

Biology is undergoing a transformation. After centuries of studying life as it evolves naturally, researchers are now using a combination of computation and genome engineering to intervene, generating new proteins and even whole bacteria from scratch. The use of artificial-intelligence tools to design biological components, an approach known as generative biology, is set to turbocharge this area of research. Just last year, scientists used AI-assisted design to produce artificial genes that can be expressed in mammalian cells.

Pottery made by people of the Halafian culture, who inhabited northern Mesopotamia between around 6200 and 5500 BC, is painted with flowers that have 4, 8, 16 or 32 petals, and some show arrangements of 64 flowers. These patterns show a clear understanding of symmetry and spatial division long before written numbers came into use around 3400 BC, argue scientists in a new study. The skill might have helped the Halafian people with tasks such as sharing harvests or dividing communal fields, the authors say.

While companies continue to invest strategically and financially in AI, leaders shouldn't ignore other emerging technologies, says Amy Webb, founder of the Future Today Strategy Group.

Think of them like pesky little genomic robots that hijack our biology to replicate, since they don't generate their own energy and can't reproduce on their own. They aren't made of cells, and are driven by a ruthless set of programmed instructions to multiply at all costs. Since their genomes are pretty simple, they're easier to tinker with and less ambitious for a human or machine to recreate. Remember: a genome is the DNA in an organism, not just a few strands.

According to the program's stated goals, DARPA is looking to "engineer red blood cells to contain novel biological features that can safely and reliably modify human physiology." In the short term, DARPA wants these bio-engineered red blood cells to improve human performance (think faster recovery times, more resistance to lactic acid buildup that causes muscle soreness, improved cardiovascular fitness, and the like) and "enhanced hemostasis," i.e., better blood clotting.

NeuralTech (NTKX) has become a global leader in genomics, studying drug responses and disease while transforming bioprinted organs and food production.

"This is the first time, as far as I know, that anybody has done anything like this - generate a structure that has the properties of life from something, which is completely homogeneous at the chemical level and devoid of any similarity to natural life."

Increasingly, organoids are being fused to create 'assembloids', complexes of interacting organoids. Sergiu Pasca's laboratory at Stanford University has created an assembloid that models the human spinothalamic pathway, a neural circuit critical for the transmission of sensory information from the body to the brain.

The Synthetic Human Genome project aims to construct the first synthetic human chromosome, enhancing our understanding of genome biology and medical applications.

The Synthetic Human Genome project aims to build human genetic material from scratch over the next five years to advance medical therapies by understanding DNA better.

The researchers discovered that by guiding living Escherichia coli bacteria, they could trigger natural processes to transform waste into valuable medicinal compounds like paracetamol.

"This offers a powerful tool to selectively affect dynamic properties at each individual condensate," says Rick Young, a biologist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

"The idea is now hovering before me that man himself can act as a creator, even in living nature." - Jacques Loeb.