IGEM:Melbourne/2008/SyntheticSociety/FirstMeetingAgenda

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First Meeting Agenda

Link to First Meeting Minutes

Meeting Location: Bio21 Level 1 Conference Room

Meeting Time: after the iGEM team meeting

Meeting Logistics: snacks and water

Current Meeting Length : ~2 hours

Present

Pre-meeting Tasks

• mail was sent out ... hopefully enough ppl will turn up
• organise projector - get this of Prof. Howlett berfore 5pm , need to put back into student area after use (get keys of Alisa)

Intro to Synthetic Society

• this is effectively what we make it ...
• (10min)why have a synthetic society???
• (5min)what should its purpose be ...
• (10min)possible futures - recruitment tool for iGEM team applicants
• (10min)how big should it get?
• (5min)have a stand at O-Week/ membership drive ...
• (5min)actual student society
• (0min)should we affilliate with other student societies
• OR just private discussion forum for people interested in synthetic biology
• (5min)weekly/monthly meetings ???

Brainstorming/Research

• (20 min)go through synthetic biology applications
• (30min) watch ljubljana presentation (http://parts.mit.edu/igem07/index.php/Ljubljana) - (need link to video - ask louis???)
• go through ethz project
• go through heinemann paper - "Synthetic biology—putting engineering into biology"
• free discussion
  • ghost in the shell/matrix downloading
  • ethical implications of synbio?
  • opensource - how can we make money from synbio or should we?
  • crazy ideas - chair-organisms / brushoteethia coli etc

systems will require a systematic approach that relies on modularity and abstraction at various cellular levels in order to be useful to a broad group of biotechnologists.

chassis - go through chassis, (problems of isolating chassis, yeast/ecoli, how do you hijack metabolism berkeley LBL team)

minimal genome host - george church isolate chassis - jason kelly question: which approach is better, discuss??? what would be the ideal host, characteristics ...

engineering proteins (our blue light, wisconsin team w/ DBD of leucine zippers) our blue light, the gvp's good place for novel parts ...

intercellular communcation ... AHL japanese team

engineering artificial gene networks start - switches (on-off eg below), complex networks (repressilator) PID control ... (show equations) complex networks - repressilator

cambridge - amplifier ustc - logic gates, go through model edinborough ... http://parts2.mit.edu/wiki/index.php/EdinburghModeling ethz - learning, go through model distinction between deterministic and stochastic modelling ... biological noise, van Oudenaarden compare with michigan/missouri team.. peking - hop-count, push-on/push-off

Possible futures : In contrast, systems design consisting of forward-engineering of biological parts, devices or systems strongly relies on computing and informatics tools that assist the design process. Ultimately, it would be desirable to have computer aided design tools—CAD tools for biological engineering—in analogy to the respective software tools in the areas of mechanical or civil engineering. Using such software, the synthetic biology design engineer would try to improve the behavior of a biological system in silico by optimizing design parameters targeting a selected objective function. Design variants would be tested computationally by means of simulations.

other ideas -ferromagnetic bacteria -temperature sensitive -different expression system (T7 polymerase etc) -synbio applications ...

free dicsussion...

wouldn't it be cool if we could ... construct a variable resistor !!!! pops capacitor, diode have been made don't resist electric current but resist pops ... don't use ohms but call them endys use the same bands http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistor

Next Meeting

• set agenda - what should we do in the mean time
• set next meeting time