BIOFAB 2010 Community Meeting

The first BIOFAB Community Meeting took place on July 19-20, 2010 at the Joint BioEnergy Institute in Emeryville, CA. The BIOFAB welcomed interested users from SynBERC and the broader synthetic biology community to participate in the day and a half meeting that brought together international experts to help us respond to needs in technical development, open innovation, and social ramifications of standardized biology.

Recorded webcast - day one

BIOFAB produces a draft-for-comment of its first human practices report

The BIOFAB has produced the first in a series of Human Practices reports on scientific, organizational, and political topics central to responsibly fulfilling its core operational mandates. The first report takes up the question “What is a part?” in biology. The report overviews foundational questions that animate the BIOFAB’s research program, interfacing those questions with a range of strategic opportunities and challenges.

BIOFAB produces its first datasheet

17 Mar 2010
Posted by kcosta

The BIOFAB's first datasheet provides information about three previously uncharacterized promoters that we obtained from the MIT Registry of Standard Biological Parts. We will use such datasheets to formally capture and share information about the parts that we build and characterize (see Canton et. al., 2008). We hope that all users, ranging from theoretical biophysicists to highschool students, will help us to develop quality measurements based upon their needs and application. An understanding of quality will help to define specific objectives for the build-out of our operational capacities.

BIOFAB launches world's first biological design-build facility

18 Jan 2010
Posted by kcosta

Berkeley-- With seed money from the National Science Foundation (NSF), bioengineers from the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University are ramping up efforts to characterize the thousands of control elements critical to the engineering of microbes so that eventually, researchers can mix and match these "DNA parts" in synthetic organisms to produce new drugs, fuels or chemicals.