Sheref Mansy then skyped in from his lab in Trento:

Sissel Tolaas was a speaker at the World Science Festival in New York in June, discussing her Synthetic Aesthetics collaboration with Christina Agapakis. Sissel says, "Smell is one of those senses where context can play a huge role. A fine cheese and a dirty foot share the same molecular smells, yet one is a delicacy and other is repulsive."

For their BO_BAD_CHE project, Christina and Sissel collected bacteria from people and used it to make 'human' cheese. "We decided to focus on cheese as a metaphor for the human organism", explains Sissel. These personalised dairy products challenge the old adage of "we are what we eat", and the boundary between what we make and who we are. Their collaboration continues: most recently, at the SB5.0 conference at Stanford in June they ran a live cheese-making session, building a library of cheeses made from bacterial cultures swabbed from the global synthetic biology community. 

Video by Fernan Federici & David Benjamin, StudioX, New York (GSAPP, Columbia University) as part of their ongoing collaboration.

Read more about the ongoing work of Will Carey and Adam Reineck from IDEO and Reid Williams from the Lim Lab at UCSF in this FastCompany article here.

Read the article here.

"Although traditional disciplinary boundaries are dissolving, the cultural differences between scientists and engineers remain strong. For biologists, genetic modification is a tool to understand natural systems, not an end in itself. Thus, making biological systems 'engineerable' — a goal of engineers in the field of synthetic biology — can seem pointless. Many biologists wonder why engineers fail to appreciate the intricate, beautiful and sophisticated designs that occur naturally. Engineers are often equally perplexed by biologists. Why are they so obsessed about the details of one particular system? Why don't they appreciate the value of replacing a complex and idiosyncratic system with a simpler, more modular and more predictable alternative? These misunderstandings can make for fascinating conversations, but they can also prevent mutually beneficial synergies."

Synthetic Aesthetics' resident and Harvard synthetic biologist Christina Agapakis in conversation with Maggie Koerth-Baker, discussing synthetic biology, design, cheese and women in science and blogging. Watch the discussion here!

A new exhibition, ‘April is the Cruellest Month ...’ inspired by T.S. Eliot's poem The Wasteland, brings together artists and scientists at ArtCell Gallery, Cambridge, UK. Combining cutting edge scientific cellular imaging and artistic vision, this show is an exploration and celebration of ‘dull roots’ with new potential.

From the exhibition website:

Jim Haseloff and Fernan Federici's amazing prints of fluorescent protein labelled transgenic plants, stained whole-mounts and 3D reconstructions of plant cell anatomy, offer an other-worldly beauty to contemporary microscopic cellular plant examination. Various staining techniques are used to label DNA, proteins, carbohydrates etc., and the digital controls of a confocal microscope allow for the clean separation of different fluorescent emission signals and the balancing of signal levels in different channels, leading to the production of images with intense clarity and colour.

Based in the Department of Plant Sciences at Cambridge University, the Haseloff Laboratory is pioneering synthetic biology, and has constructed a series of tools for controlling gene misexpression, and marking specific cells in growing plants. The lab is building a new generation of genetic circuits that incorporate intercellular communication, and could be used to generate self-organised behaviour at the cellular scale. These kind of circuits and cell-cell interactions play a key role in plant development and morphogenesis, and synthetic circuits will allow bold new approaches to reprogramming plant systems.

Synthetic Biology is an emerging field that employs engineering principles for constructing genetic systems. The approach is based on the use of well-characterised and reusable components, and numerical models for the design of biological circuits.

The Arts Catalyst, UCL and Synthetic Aesthetics in partnership with SymbioticA present a 6-day intensive exchange laboratory for artists, designers, synthetic biologists, engineers and others.  

IDEO brainstorm

Mariana and Chris exploring data systems in synthetic biology at CCRMA, Stanford.

Listening to the sonification of brain data from a patient with epilepsy.
CCRMA Listening Room at Stanford University.