There are millions of tons of lignocellulosic and cellulosic waste every year as a result of agricultural activities. How amazing would it be to be able to transform this waste material to something useful? There are several ways this can be done. For example, lignocellulose can be discomposed by using a combination of physical, chemical … Leer más
Standards are the basis of technology and enable a common language that is required to achieve rigorous descriptions and exact measurements of properties. Although synthetic biology requires the use of standards (as the engineering discipline that it is), the scientific community is very reluctant to accepting them. Standards must comply with several properties, like being … Leer más
Synthetic Biology Open Language (SBOL) is an open standard for the representation of in silico biological designs, facilitating computational design, exchange, and reproducibility of biological systems. SBOL uses RDF/XML serialization to express RDF graphs as an XML documents. Although this syntax is ideal for precise machine communication, SBOL RDF/XML is rather complex for humans to … Leer más
Protein-protein interactions are involved in almost all cellular processes, they define scaffolds, regulate cellular localization and participate in functioning in cellular machines, such as those performing transcription, replication, splicing and others. In order to manipulate cellular processes we need a reliable standardized set of orthogonal protein-protein interaction modules. Coiled-coil peptide heterodimers are small polypeptide modules … Leer más
Standard representation of data is key in synthetic biology and, in this context, the Synthetic Biology Open Language (SBOL) has emerged as a data standard to represent information about genetic circuits. The SBOL-OWL ontology is a useful resource for the community as a semantic layer for genetic circuit designs. This way, queries can be simplified and … Leer más
The engineering of bio-computations in cells usually follow a one-device-one-function strategy. That is, an engineered system will only perform one pre-defined function – no matter how complex this is. In this paper, we present a design for engineering systems capable of task switching, thus moving between a number of pre-programmed functions (or “tasks”). Within our … Leer más
Synthetic biology (SB) is an engineering view on biotechnology. Although there is a lack of consensus on the definition of this emerging discipline, the most accepted one is that SB consists of designing, redesigning and constructing biological modules, systems, and machines in a predictive way, converting them into à la carte sources of products and … Leer más