The Living Revolution

Biocomposite materials can utilise potentially waste carbon sources and capture them for a useful purpose. For example, Dr. Aled Deakin Roberts talked with us about how he can create a biocomposite material from ashes using a bio-inspired adhesive. Further to this, biocomposites also open up opportunities for additional properties, such as the addition of organic molecules that cannot be added to classic materials as they are broken down at high temperatures, biocompatibility and potentially improved properties. Dr Deakin Roberts talked with us about his invention, space concrete, known as 'Starcrete', a biocomposite material with twice the strength of typical concrete and held together by microalgae.

Standardization  of biological parts to make them more independent, scalable and tunable is a hope for the future of synthetic biology. Dr. Brecht de Paepe talked with us about how achieving this standardization would have a tremendous effect on efficiency in the lab and make us better able to build the solutions we so desperately need and collaborate together more effectively. 

Controlling the behaviour and output of microorganisms is one of the most important pieces in the biotechnology puzzle. Without an improved level of control in biology, it is difficult to create consistent results from engineered organisms. Future prospects hope to allow genetic circuits to be designed on a computer and to accurately predict the effect of these gene circuits when they are inserted into living bacteria. Another topic discussed is the benefits of co-culturing bacteria in order to activate gene clusters that are turned off when a bacteria strain is cultured alone. Finally, we touched on biosecurity and Miro's work at the Stanford Existential Risk Initiative.

 Water contamination is an issue we face from past and current industrial activities that affects our health. Of course the ideal scenario would be not to let the contamination escape in the first place, however, this is sometimes unavoidable. FREDsense technologies have developed a biological system that senses contaminants in water supplies and transfers this information to an electrical device for rapid and real-time monitoring of contaminants. 

 Discovering the remaining part of a human genome. The first draft of the human genome was published in 2001, now, over 20 years later, we have a complete sequence of the human genome. The newly complete genome contains sequences that were difficult to sequence using older methods and required newer nanopore sequencing to complete the final parts. The region consists of repeating units of DNA, which at first might sound quite boring but these regions are thought to play an important role in ageing and gene regulation. 

 Most of life science is reliant on the ability to grow the thing you want to study, this requires media. Media is the 'food' which cells use to grow and as such it is important that cells get the right nutrients to grow optimally. Dr. Rebecca Vaught talked with us about how she and her collegues at the Van Heron Labs are providing bespoke media products to many labs in order to maximise growth conditions according to individual research projects. This will increase prospects and productivity of these research projects increasing the likelihood of great results and useful biotechnologies. 

Programmable materials, living materials, cell-derived materials, these are all things we talk about in today's episode with Prof. Allen Liu. We discuss how the separate fields of Biomaterials and Synthetic Biology can come together to produce enhanced Biomaterials that can be tailored to have specific properties that could fix many problems. These living biomaterials are an exciting prospect and can provide easily tunable characteristics, allowing access to potentially new arrangements of material properties.

Without the ability to synthesise DNA, biotechnology would not be a shred of what it is today. In this episode, Dr. John Gill talks to us about the future of DNA synthesis technology and how he and those working at CODEX DNA are trying to bring DNA synthesis to the lab bench. This will massively increase productivity by cutting down on time spent waiting for DNA to arrive from external producers. The methods used are also non-toxic, which provides a better alternative to current methods that produce toxic chemicals.

Today we spoke with Dr. Jake Beal who is a scientist at BBN and a former researcher at MIT. He shared with us his incredible grasp on why it is important to improve measurements in synthetic biology research if we are going to create a predictable and repeatable engineering field out of biology. The realisation of this vision would allow for the rapid development of biotechnology solutions to the problems we face today such as sustainability, circular economy, medicine and health. Hope you enjoy the show!

Dr. George Taylor talks with us about the cultivated meat industry and how synthetic biology can be used to accerlerate the adoption of this new form of food. Cultivated meat has the potential to be much more efficient than animal farming and of course avoids concerns for animal welfare and the ethics of factory farming. In singapore it is already possible to eat cultivated meat in a resteraunt and The Netherlands has just leagalised the production, potentially paving the way for many more countries.