Brown Synthetic Biology

BIOL 1940T (CRN 14871) Synthetic Biological Systems

Mondays and Wednesdays 3.30pm - 5.00pm, CIT Room 227

• First class is Wednesday August 5th.

• Taught by interdisciplinary faculty
• Opportunity for individual or group practical projects in Spring 2008.
• Join the Google group for announcements about this course.
• Open to juniors or seniors with relevant backgrounds in one of the key areas, or with instructors permission.

Outline

A multidisciplinary course that combines seven areas of science and engineering giving undergraduates a solid foundation in a cutting edge field of biological engineering. Synthetic biology is a mixture of biology, chemistry, engineering, genetic engineering and biophysics. It builds on recent work in systems biology which involves the modeling of biological systems, but goes further in that it involves the construction and standardization of biological parts, that fit together to form more complex systems.

Background

In 1978 the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to Daniel Nathans and Hamilton Smith and it was predicated that "the new era of synthetic biology” had arrived , where genes could be cut up, changed around and put back together again to form novel function. However it was not until 2000 that the first examples of an engineered biological circuits were published in Nature. One was a synthetic oscillator; an engineered strain of E.coli capable of cyclic expression of green fluorescent protein, the other was a bacterial toggle switch capable of switching the protein to be expressed into one of two states. Since then engineers’ interest and contributions to biology have created a completely new field of ‘synthetic biology’.

Synthetic biology is a mixture of biology, chemistry, engineering, genetic engineering and biophysics. It builds on recent work in systems biology which involves the modeling of biological systems, but goes further in that it involves the construction and standardization of biological parts, that fit together to form more complex systems. One of the key factors that is making synthetic biology a reality is the falling cost of two key technologies, sequencing of DNA (now just $7 per read) and synthesis of novel DNA (now $0.69 per base pair). This fall in price continues to halve about every 18 months and was recently compared to the doubling of the number of processors being put onto computer chips which also happens every 18 months. If this pace of development continues then not only is a new field of science and engineering forming but also a new industrial revolution, based on smaller, cleaner biological machines.

Course aim

This course will aim to you a thorough grounding in the theory and current literature of synthetic biology as well as provide you with an up-to-date framework in modeling and systems biology. It will include the fundamental principles of engineering such as abstraction, modularity, standardization and composition and how these are being applied to biology. You will get an overview of the biological techniques specific to experts in biology and engineering at Brown. The course will also include a number of visiting lectures, experts in the field from outside of Brown.

Assessment:

• Synthetic Biological System 1: Part Design (Group project)
• Synthetic Biological System 1: System Design (Individual project)
• Primary literature class presentation
• Synthetic society paper, ethics and impacts
• Computer modeling labs/problem sets.

       faculty  	 Topic   	                                                Department / area
1 	Gary Wessel 	 Overview and Bioethics 	                                MCB
2 	Wolfgang Peti    Protein engineering 1	                                        MPPB
3 	Marc Johnson 	 Bioenergy 	                                                MCB
4 	Tayhas Palmore   Principles of Engineering                                      Biomedical Engineering
5 	Tom Webster 	 Nanotechnology 	                                        Biomedical Engineering
6 	Jay Tang 	 Microbial forces 	                                        Physics
7 	Nicola Neretti 	 Deterministic models 	                                        Physics
8 	Alex Brodsky 	 Techniques in synthetic biology 1                              MCB
9 	Jeff Morgan      Techniques in synthetic biology 2                              MPPB
10 	Jim Head         Exploring Planetary Environments: Earth and the Solar System   Geology
11 	Suzanne Sindi 	 Stochastic Modeling 	                                        Applied Mathematics
12 	Woods Hole 	 Exploring Microbiology 	 
13 	Jason Sello  	 Organic Synthesis 	                                        Chemistry
14 	tbc              Metabolic Engineering 	                                        Chemistry
15 	Sherief Reda 	 Engineering systems 	                                        Electronic Engineering
16     John Savage      Nanocomputing                                                  Computer Science
17     Anubhav Tripathi Microfluidics                                                  Microfluidics
18     Karen Haberstroh Principles of Engineering 2                                    Biomedical Engineering
19     Hasan Demirci    Protein engineering 2	                                        MCB
20     Jamie Gagnon     Techniques in synthetic biology 3                              MCB

       The course outline will be finalized over the summer