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Agenda
Day 1 - 6 March 2008
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8:00 |
Registration
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9:30 |
Regulatory, IP, Ethical and Business Issues
Chaired by Laurie Zoloth, Professor, Northwestern University
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9:35 |
Life by Design: The Prehistory of Synthetic Biology
Luis Campos, Assistant Professor, Drew University
Synthetic biology, understood in the broader sense as "the engineering approach to biology," has a rich history dating back to the dawn of the twentieth century with the first attempts to develop a "technology of the living substance."
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10:05 |
Synthetic Biology, IP and Social Norms
Clara Sattler de Sousa e Brito, LL.M. Student, Yale Law School and Researcher, Max Planck Institute for IP
Synthetic biology comes along with slogans like “open source biology”. This spirit of open access and a culture of sharing could influence the balance both between society’s and inventors’ interests as well as between a free market and IP rights.
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10:35 |
Coffee break and networking in exhibition hall
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11:20 |
The Promises and Perils of Self-Regulation in Synthetic Biology
Agomoni Ganguli Mitra, Research Fellow and PhD Student, University of Zurich
Portraying ethicists and others as uninformed and harmful may be a counterproductive strategy. The Asilomar model of self-regulation, the GMO debate and stem cell regulation will be discussed.
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11:50 |
Hide and Seek: The Ethics of Curiosity and Security in Synthetic Biology
Laurie Zoloth, Professor, Northwestern University
Some classic sources for reflection on the ethics of discovery, and alternatives for framing a new discourse for debate on the ethics of this science will be presented.
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12:20 |
Lunch & networking in exhibition hall followed by poster viewing
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13:45 |
Protein, Metabolic & Therapeutic Engineering
Chaired by Andreas Herrmann, Professor for Polymer Chemistry and Bioengineering, University of Groningen
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13:50 |
Nucleic Acid Hybrid Materials for Synthetic Biology
Andreas Herrmann, Professor for Polymer Chemistry and Bioengineering, University of Groningen
DNA was successfully combined with synthetic polymers. Due to hybrid formation new material properties could be evolved that are important for diagnostics and drug delivery.
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14:20 |
Bioinformatic Design of Bioactive Peptides
Denis Shields, Professor of Clinical Bioinformatics, University College Dublin
Bioinformatic approaches seek to define the bioactive oligopeptide parts lists of human, pathogen, and model organism genomes. Application to potentially signalling-rich juxtamembrane regions of platelet proteins identified both peptide agonists and antagonists.
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14:50 |
Coffee break and networking in exhibition hall
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15:30 |
High-Throughput Protein and Gene Design
Jingdong Tian, Assistant Professor, Duke University
New software design tools and high-throughput, cost-effective synthesis, screen and validation technologies have been developed to explore engineering principles and new solutions to key issues in protein and gene design and production.
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16:00 |
Engineering Protein Parts by Directed Evolution and Design
Kristian Müller, Assistant Professor, Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg
The presentation will demonstrate the stabilization of enzymes and the dissection of proteins and their modular reassembly.
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16:30 |
Combinatorial Synthesis of Peptide Arrays with a Laser Printer
Frank Breitling, Research Scientist, German Cancer Research Centre (DKFZ)
The group have developed a method for the combinatorial synthesis of peptide arrays that immobilizes the 20 different amino acids in amino acid particles. Post printing with a colour laser printer the particles are melted to induce the coupling reaction.
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17:00 |
Drinks reception compliments of SyntheticBiology.net |
Day 2 - 7 March 2008
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9:30 |
Design & Fabrication of Parts: Devices and Systems
Chaired by Alfonso Jaramillo, Assistant Professor, Ecole Polytechnique
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9:35 |
Automatic Design in Synthetic Biology
Alfonso Jaramillo, Assistant Professor, Ecole Polytechnique
The group has developed computational methodologies to aid in the design of biological parts and devices. Their modelling procedures incorporate experimental data together with optimisation algorithms to design complex behaviour.
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10:05 |
Synthetic and Systematic Biology on the Geniom Platform – High Throughput Gene Synthesis and Biological Analytics
Peer Stähler, Chief Scientific Officer, febit biotech
Febit’s patented Geniom Microarray Synthesizer allows high throughput gene synthesis and multiplex microarray analysis thanks to the most powerful oligonucleotide source inside a single benchtop device that can produce up to 500.000 60mer oligonucleotides a day.
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10:35 |
Coffee break and networking in exhibition hall
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11:20 |
Genomic Nanoprocessors
Peter Ghazal, Director of Division of Pathway Medicine, Edinburgh University
This talk will describe the construction and characterization of a DNA Holliday junction structure as a first generation electronically controllable label free bio-switch based detector as a building block for biosensor applications and future research in bio-computing.
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11:50 |
The Computer-Aided Synthesis of Stochasticity in Biochemical Systems
Marc Riedel, Assistant Professor, University of Minnesota
The presentation will describe a methodology and a computer-aided design tool for synthesizing biochemical reactions that produce different combinations of molecular types according to a specified probability distribution.
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12:20 |
Lunch & networking in exhibition hall followed by poster viewing
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13:00 |
Guided Tour at the Sanger Centre (full programme below, at the second scheduled tour) - 1st Small Group
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13:45 |
Cell & Tissue Engineering
Martin Pule, MRC Clinician Scientist Fellow, Department of Haematology, University College London
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13:50 |
T-Cell Engineering for Cancer Therapy
Martin Pule, MRC Clinician Scientist Fellow, Department of Haematology, University College London
Strategies to program T-cells to home certain sites have been developed. Clinical studies have already started, albeit with the most basic forms of T-cell engineering. Engineering of T-cells as a refined and non-toxic cancer treatment modality will be discussed.
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14:20 |
The Minimal Cell, Model for Early Living Cells
Giovanni Murtas, Senior Scientist, Centro Enrico Fermi
Synthetic Biology allows the construction of a minimal cell model recalling the basic properties of early living cells as systems “alive” without pretending to reconstruct a prebiotic cell.
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14:50 |
Simple Genetic Modules and not so Simple Computations
Juan Poyatos, Associate Professor, Spanish National Research Council
Synthetic circuits of only a few molecular components can induce complex behaviours. In this talk, it will be discussed how "simple" genetic modules are also capable of exhibiting "not so simple" biochemical computations, whilst performing biologically relevant information-processing tasks.
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15:20 |
Coffee Break and Poster Award Ceremony
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15:40 |
Guided tour at the Sanger Centre - 2nd Small Group
Why not take this opportunity to tour the largest sequencing facilities in Europe. Book early - spaces are limited.
Contact enquiries@selectbiosciences.com for details.
Topics developed during the tour:
Introduction to genome research
Human Genome Project and beyond
Overview of Sanger Institute research
Process of Sanger sequencing
The Tour includes the visit of:
The Wellcome Trust Genome Campus
The high-throughput sequencing facilities
The Data Centre's custom-built machine rooms |
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16:00 |
Close of conference |
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