We’re excited to announce our first networking event, GeneMods Connect! This event is intended as a time to socialize with other members of the GeneMods community, share about your research interests, and find potential connections or collaborations. RSVP soon using the form below. Space is limited to 30 participants.
Thursday, May 12 5-7pm Pancoe Cafe
Light dinner provided Alcoholic beverages provided
Just after the grand opening of Northwestern’s new Center for Synthetic Biology, I got an email from a research assistant professor with a background in physics who was excited about synbio and wanted to know how to get up to speed on the field. What follows is a modified version of the email I sent him, which comprises most of the resources I’ve found and have used online to learn about synthetic biology. This post is by no means comprehensive (the list of important labs is especially incomplete, and probably merits its own post), but hopefully this is a useful starting point for anyone interested in learning more about the field.
1. There are a lot of really excellent presentations on Youtube which provide broad overviews of synthetic biology and background about where the field came from. Here are a few of them, which I’ve tried to arrange from most accessible to most academic/wonky:
2. For more in-depth background training in cell/molecular biology:
3. There are a bunch of excellent review articles for the field that link out to lots of seminal synbio papers. Here are some of them:
4. This special issue of Nature on systems and synthetic biology, while ~5 years old, is filled with important papers and perspectives, both contemporary with its publishing (2010) and reviewing the highlights of the field from 2000-2010. I particularly recommend the News and Views articles in it for a quick summary of where the field has gone and is going.
5. There are several labs whose research I recommend searching for/keeping abreast of, as they are important for various areas of synthetic biology:
Synthetic Biology professors at Northwestern:
6. If you’re interested in learning about the policy/industry/economic aspects of synthetic biology, I recommend Rob Carlson’s book Biology is Technology, a lot of which is available online through that link for free. Carlson is generally a good source of realistic predictions about the field’s future. I also recommend his blog, Synthesis.
7. Speaking of blogs, here are a few other blogs/news sources I’ve found that regularly feature news/commentary about synthetic biology:
8. Carlson’s not the only person writing policy pieces on the field. Synberc (the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center, one of the first/biggest synbio organizations) maintains a list of white papers which discuss and argue about how the research, commercialization and regulation of synthetic biology should proceed. They make for very interesting reading.
9. Here are a few journals that regularly publish synthetic biology research:
10. Finally, to keep up with current developments in synthetic biology, I recommend setting an auto-search on PubMed and Google News for synthetic biology. I wrote an article recently about how to do this. I actually think this is a more efficient way to find new research/developments in synthetic biology than reading particular journals.
I’m planning to update/revise this post as new and better resources come to my attention. If you think I left something obvious off, let me know in the comments!
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