synthetic biology
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This Isn’t A Horror Movie: Scientists Are Turning Organs Into Paper Cranes
The new guy at work invites you over to his house. You feel uneasy. Sure, he’s a hard worker, a fast typist, and his intense focus quickly made him an indispensable coworker. But his scarred face seems to betray some violent past. His measured speech seems manufactured. Still, you can’t remember the last new friend…
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Scientists Just Took A Major Step Toward The First Complex Artificial Life
In 2008, researchers built the first artificial genome, a wonder of synthetic biology in which scientists generated all 582,970 base pairs of the bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium‘s genome entirely from scratch. It was an unparalleled scientific achievement, requiring scientists to carefully design 101 unique DNA fragments so that their codes would overlap and stick together, then…
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How Scientists Plan To Grow Cities Out Of Living Organisms
Imagine a future where there is no need to cut down a tree and reshape that raw material into a chair or table. Instead, we could grow our furniture by custom-engineering moss or mushrooms. Perhaps glowing bacteria will light our cities, and we’ll be able to bring back extinct species, or wipe out Lyme disease…
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Want To Get Into Bio-Hacking? Here’s A Beginner Bioreactor For Engineering Cells At Home
Bioengineering is pervasive these days — just look at your medicine, your makeup, or your food — but the science behind it is still pretty inaccessible to tinkerers. Enter Amino: A small bioengineering lab that will walk you through the process of creating everything from glow-in-the-dark cells to an anti-cancer research compound.