Talking Synthetic Biology — Launch of Synthetic Biology Dialogue Report
Venter does it again — Landmark paper published by the J. Craig Venter Institute
Redesigning ribosomes — Nature paper by the Chin lab
Views and opinions from the world of synthetic biology
Fernan Federici reflects on the growing community of researchers interested in plant synthetic biology.
The fourth international conference on Synthetic Biology (SB4.0) was recently held at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. With almost twice the number of attendees compared to SB3.0 in Zurich, SB4.0 saw the main leaders in the field congregate to share their work through 3 days of very exciting talks, workshops and poster exhibition. Main topics of focus in the sessions included biomedicine, biofuels, genetic circuits design, the iGEM competition, minimal cell construction and synthetic genomics.
Kim de Mora concludes from this year's conference that the synthetic biology community is reaching critical mass.
My experience of SB 4.0 almost felt like that of an external observer of the field. I've been involved in Synthetic Biology since participating in the iGEM competition in 2006, but this was my first SB conference. I had attended BioSysBio in 2007 and the BioBricks foundation meetings after iGEM in 2007, but SB 4.0 was just on another scale.
James Brown notes the growing commercial interest in synthetic biology shown at SB4.0 in Hong Kong.
After MIT, Berkeley and last year Zurich, The SB Conference series moved to Asia for the first time in 2008. Over 560 attendees made their way to Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in October for SB4.0, a significant increase on last year’s 300, providing a very powerful reminder of the rapid growth and propagation of Synthetic Biology across the globe.
Jane Calvert reports on what stood out for her at the gathering in Hong Kong
For a social scientist, Synthetic Biology 4.0 was a very interesting experience. It included sessions on issues such as global social impact, biosecurity, future scenarios, intellectual property and commercialization. Also, in his closing comments to the conference, Drew Endy acknowledged that “we have new colleagues from social sciences, civil society organisations and industry”.
Baojun Wang feels that this year's conference reflects the fact that synthetic biology is now being put to work
Looking at the meeting agenda, I found there is a great difference between SB4.0 and SB3.0, which I attended last year in Zurich. A lot of practical applications using synthetic biology (including in industrial biotechnologies, medicine, energy and environment, etc.) filled this year’s meeting programme, while at SB3.0 there was a more focus on proof-of-principle examples and foundational technologies in this field.
