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Intellectual Unit: Experimental Tools for Biological Discovery

Synthetic Biology: Cellular and Molecular Engineering

• link to idb website for this nanocourse

Instructors

• Nanocourse Lecturers: George Church (talk), William Shih (talk) (co-director), and Pamela Silver (talk) (co-director)

Course Description

Synthetic biology explores the design rules for building artificial behavior of biomolecular systems through cycles of construction and comparison of intended versus observed behaviors. The ability to synthesize biomimetic behavior is an important benchmark for biological understanding. This course will introduce strategies for engineering cellular and molecular systems and will explore current and future applications for synthetic biology approaches.

Meeting Times

• First Meeting: Monday, 2007 October 22nd, 1:30pm–4:30pm
  • Location: Goldenson 122 (on the HMS quad)

• Second Meeting: Friday, 2007 October 26th, 12pm–2pm
  • Location: Warren Alpert Building 436

Course Project

• For those enrolled in the nanocourse, the course project will be a short proposal (800–1000 words plus figures) describing a synthetic biology project that can be completed by a graduate student in three years or less. The proposals, in Adobe PDF form, must be posted on this wiki page by noon on Thursday, 2007 October 25.
• Registered students and instructors will read the proposals and meet on Friday, 2007 October 26 at noon to critique the proposals (see above).
• To see some potential project ideas, please browse through the project and brainstorming pages of former iGEM teams. If you decide to adopt one of those ideas, you need to propose a significant improvement or alteration that represents value added to the original idea. Be sure to credit the sources for your inspirations. Here are some example links (everyone, please feel free to add more or to reorganize):
  • http://parts.mit.edu/wiki/index.php/Schools_Participating_in_iGEM_2006
  • http://openwetware.org/wiki/IGEM:Harvard/2007/Brainstorming
  • http://openwetware.org/wiki/IGEM:Harvard/2006/Brainstorming
  • http://openwetware.org/wiki/IGEM:MIT/2007
  • http://openwetware.org/wiki/IGEM:MIT/2006/System_brainstorming

Reading List (Recommended)

Lecture 1 (Silver)

The first 3 papers are reviews and are highly recommended as introductory readings. The other papers are examples of designing systems that may be useful background for those taking the course and for further background in the field.

1. Drubin DA, Way JC, and Silver PA. . pmid:17289915. PubMed HubMed [pas1]
2. Voigt CA. . pmid:16978856. PubMed HubMed [pas2]
3. Andrianantoandro E, Basu S, Karig DK, and Weiss R. . pmid:16738572. PubMed HubMed [pas3]
4. Chang MC and Keasling JD. . pmid:17108985. PubMed HubMed [pas4]
5. Anderson JC, Clarke EJ, Arkin AP, and Voigt CA. . pmid:16330045. PubMed HubMed [pas5]
6. Deans TL, Cantor CR, and Collins JJ. . pmid:17662949. PubMed HubMed [pas6]
7. Ajo-Franklin CM, Drubin DA, Eskin JA, Gee EP, Landgraf D, Phillips I, and Silver PA. . pmid:17875664. PubMed HubMed [pas7]
8. Basu S, Gerchman Y, Collins CH, Arnold FH, and Weiss R. . pmid:15858574. PubMed HubMed [pas8]
9. Elowitz MB and Leibler S. . pmid:10659856. PubMed HubMed [pas9]

Lecture 2 (Shih)

10. []

Lecture 3 (Church)

10. []

Uploaded Proposals

Remember to upload a PDF of your file by Thursday, October 25th by noon. Uploading your file on time means that your fellow classmates and instructors will have ample time to carefully read all of the proposals. Please name your files something meaningful. I suggest the following format... NameofStudent_syntheticbiology2007.