In Development: An Open Source Language For Cell Programming 31
hessian writes with a story at Wired (excerpt below) about a project from Drew Endy of the International Open Facility Advancing Biotechnology, or BIOFAB, to standardize a programming language connecting genetic information from DNA to the cell components that DNA can create. "The BIOFAB project is still in the early stages. Endy and the team are creating the most basic of building blocks — the 'grammar' for the language. Their latest achievement, recently reported in the journal Science, has been to create a way of controlling and amplifying the signals sent from the genome to the cell. Endy compares this process to an old fashioned telegraph. 'If you want to send a telegraph from San Francisco to Los Angeles, the signals would get degraded along the wire,' he says. "At some point, you have to have a relay system that would detect the signals before they completely went to noise and then amplify them back up to keep sending them along their way.""
Good job, Slashdot, your SSL is expired (Score:3, Informative)
Try it and see [slashdot.org]. Expired about an hour ago. Glad everyone is on the ball.
Re:Good job, Slashdot, your SSL is expired (Score:4, Informative)
Everyone seems to be screwing up their SSL lately. Bing is broken too [bing.com], because the cert seems to point to some akamai domain and isn't valid for bing.com.
The Science Article in Question (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2013/03/27/science.1232758 [sciencemag.org]
Amplifying Genetic Logic Gates
Abstract
Organisms must process information encoded via developmental and environmental signals to survive and reproduce. Researchers have also engineered synthetic genetic logic to realize simpler, independent control of biological processes. We developed a three-terminal device architecture, termed the transcriptor, that uses bacteriophage serine integrases to control the flow of RNA polymerase along DNA. Integrase-mediated inversion or deletion of DNA encoding transcription terminators or a promoter modulate transcription rates. We realize permanent amplifying AND, NAND, OR, XOR, NOR, and XNOR gates actuated across common control signal ranges and sequential logic supporting autonomous cell-cell communication of DNA encoding distinct logic gate states. The single-layer digital logic architecture developed here enables engineering of amplifying logic gates to control transcription rates within and across diverse organisms.