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"Engineering artificial cytoskeletons" - Dyche Mullins

"The fundamental problem of cellular medicine: More is different" Consider a chemotactic cell. The cell's motility is derived from a motile actin network - constant polymerization and protrusion and debranching and depolymerization. Not enough is known about the "strokes" of the motility engine - that is to say, how ...

"DNA Origami" - Paul Rothemund

Richard Feynman once challenged the world to produce print the information in the encyclopedia britannica in a space no larger than that of a head of a pin. Science has since developed techniques that could potentially be used to accomplish this goal, but may be "impractical" for a variety ...

"Biologically inspired nanofabrication" - Dan Morse

Consider the silica structures that comprise the shells of diatoms. The precision of nanoscale architectual control of the silica shell fabrication process exceeds human technology. The fabrication process is very mild, by human standards: low temperatures, high yields, etc. The scale of production is enourmous - "gigatons!" Much ...

"Magnetite biominerlization in bacteria" - Arash Komeili

Thus begins the MATERIALS SESSION and ends the ENERGY SESSION. Magnetotactic bacteria have organelles called magnetosomes with which they can orient in (geo)magnetic fields. They prefer oxic-anoxic interfaces in their environment. By orienting against the geomagnetic field, they can control for lateral motion and search simply in a vertical ...

"Shotgun mapping of transcription regulation" - Timothy Gardner

Largely focused on network biology. Antibiotic development (IDed potentiators of cipro), bioenergy, and synthetic biology. In particular focusing on techniques to speed up determining what these networks look like. Techniques for characterizing metabolic networks are better developed than those for transcription. The RS latch is the fundamental ...

"Ethanol Production" - Nancy Ho

Nancy Ho is the leader of the Laboratory of Renewable Resources Engineering at Purdue Univerity and has developed recombinant strains of yeast with 20-30% increases in yield of ethanol fermentation (I think that's how the moderator introduced her). Plants are abundant across the plaent, and cellulose comprises about 45% of the ...

Synthetic Biology 2.0

I'm in Berkeley at Synthetic Biology 2.0. I was taking notes by hand, but I think it would be more fruitful to just make a bunch of posts in near-real time.  Here goes: Craig Venter is telling us about the incredible diversity of microbial life; a diversity that is ripe ...

October 17th 2008
Tags: food No Comments

Cuchi Cuchi 1

Thai cocktail It's like an effervescent thai foot massage... For your tongue. It even taste a little gingery, but it lacks Ginger. A syrupy lime kick transitions into basilness, somehow ending with licorice. Yum! Caip They say it's been made impure with all the extra ingredients.. But it's like ...
August 1st 2008
Tags: Uncategorized No Comments

Eastern Standard Cocktails

Notes from my exploration of eastern standard's cocktail menu: Old Cuban: reminds me of a mojito + champagne - it's very tasty. Periodista: "rum for the intrepid reporter" - a little more than simply a mojito in a cocktail glass (with delicious ice crystals), the periodista is a citrusy drink with a ...
July 14th 2008
Tags: diybio No Comments

DIYbio 3 - Gel Electrophoresis

Thanks to everyone for a great meeting: Michael, Jason, Sophia, Benny, Topher, Ricardo, Alex, Alec, nublabs, and everyone else. Overview: DIYbio 2 & 3 were focused on gel electrophoresis - we started by researching all the amateur gel protocols we could find online (notably the MacGuyver Project and the MAKE protocol, ...
July 9th 2008
Tags: code No Comments

RubyU class 1 setup notes

My notes for getting all the prerequisites for Matt Knox's 1st RubyU class (hosted by Sermo) set up on my MacBook Pro (10.5).  Also see the friendfeed RubyU room. == getting prereqs installed == ruby > anvil:rubyclass macowell$ ruby -verison > ruby 1.8.6 (2008-03-03 patchlevel 114) [i686-darwin9.2.2] gems See http://www.rubygems.org/read/chapter/1 > anvil:rubyclass macowell$ gem environment > - ...
June 11th 2008
Tags: conference, diybio No Comments

DIYbio in 5 minutes - O’Reilly Ignite Boston 3

DIYbio in 5 minutes - O'Reilly ignite Boston from mac cowell on Vimeo. Here is an overview of DIYbio in 5 minutes - recorded at O'Reilly's Ignite Boston 2008.

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