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.

• 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.

Synthetic Biological Systems

BIOL 1940T

Course Schedule

Fall 2007