Synthetic Biology: Beating the Cell at its Own Game

Your body routinely produces 200 billion red blood cells every day, yet you could spend years at a lab bench attempting to artificially synthesize all of the raw materials that those cells are made of. Your cells manage to do that - and to assemble new cells out of those raw materials - with relative ease. Synthetic biology aims to design and construct biological systems to make valuable products or perform constructive tasks. The tremendous diversity in the natural world provides us with a versatile and complex set of biological tools. We'll discuss how synthetic biologists apply and hone these tools, and to what ends.

Speaker: Terry Johnson, UC Berkeley

Room 100