Date/Time
Date(s) - Sunday, April 8, 2018
3:00 pm - 6:00 pm

Location
Biotech Without Borders

Categories No Categories

How close are we to mimicking life? Harnessing recent advances in synthetic biology, extracts containing the inner machinery from bacterial cells can be directly programmed with DNA that encodes synthetic gene circuits or networks. They can be used as the ‘guts’ of an artificial cell, or used in a test tube. “Cell-free” synthetic biology has major applications for rapid design of regulatory circuits and biosensors, but also getting closer to building a functioning cell out of non-living molecules; both to guide our understanding of life at a cellular level and revolutionize engineering of biological systems.

In this workshop, you’ll use a cell-free extract to take first steps in cell-free synthetic biology by designing and programming a logic gate with DNA, expressing DNA in a cell-free extract and visualizing the results.

Dr. Jenny Molloy is a Shuttleworth Foundation Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, studying the role and impact of open approaches to intellectual property for a sustainable and equitable bioeconomy. Jenny is a molecular biologist by training and is particularly interested in making research tools for biology – both hardware and “wetware” – more accessible, used and useful. She is an organiser of the Gathering for Open Science Hardware and co-founded Biomakespace, the first community biology lab in Cambridge UK.