Engagement Activities – Portabolomics

Evolution or Revolution?

Sara Friedl — Tue, 28 Jan 2020 11:54:30 +0000

The Great North Museum 31st January – 23rd March 2020

https://www.ncl.ac.uk/peals/exhibitions/evolutionorrevolution/

This exhibition of artworks made by Dr Marianne Wilde was part of a strand of public engagement work, led by Dr Ken Taylor, as part of the Synthetic Portabolomics project. The pieces reflected Marianne’s engagement with synthetic biology; drawing on historical references as well as her experiences in the laboratories.

Synthetic biology is seen by some people as a revolution in the way biologists can manipulate life, while others see it as an evolution of the genetic science and biology from which it is derived. The exhibition asked questions of the visitors, exploring this dichotomy and the notion of how such work might be done in a framework of ‘Responsible Research and Innovation’.

The exhibition included a video made by the Newcastle-based company Roots and Wings.

Photo credit Colin Davison.

Drs Marianne Wilde, Ken Taylor and Simon Woods would like to thank the following people and organisations for making this exhibition possible:

The staff of the Great North Museum.

Dr Yulia Yuzenkova, Dr Richard Daniel, Dr Emanuela Torelli, Dr Ben Shirt Ediss and Dr Aurelie Guyet along with PhD students Grace Goldsmith and Giorgio Lai for their help and patience in the laboratories.

Newcastle University Faculties of Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS) and Science, and Agriculture and Engineering (SAgE) for providing the funding to enable this programme of work and the exhibition.

The Synthetic Portabolomics project is led by Professor Natalio Krasnogor and funded by EPSRC grant EP/N031962/1.

PEALS 20th Anniversary Exhibition at the Great North Museum

Sara Friedl — Tue, 26 Nov 2019 10:27:39 +0000

On the 19th of November 2019, an exhibition in the Great North Museum: Hancock opened celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Policy, Ethics and Life Sciences Research Centre (PEALS) and their engagement with artists from different fields.

This includes a ‘workin progress’ exhibit relating to Portabolomics that Dr Marianne Wilde has been working on with Grace and Giorgio, two of our PhD students.

Cyanobacterium Synechococcus elongatus PCC7942/BG11+ Agar/Glass Petri Dish

Artist Marianne Wilde in collaboration with Giorgio Lai, PhD student in the Yuzenkova Laboratory.

Bacillus subtilis / Nutrient Agar / Glass Petri Dish

Artist Marianne Wilde in collaboration with Grace Georgina Goldsmith MRes, PhD student in the Daniel Laboratory.

You can find the exhibition on the first floor ‘Galleria’ space and is free and open to anyone during normal museum opening hours, so please come along.

To continue reading, please go to https://www.ncl.ac.uk/press/articles/latest/2019/11/peals20years/#.XdgAN2ePPV0.twitter

Workshop on Bio-Design for Portability (BD4P)

Sara Friedl — Wed, 20 Nov 2019 14:01:32 +0000

Workshop on Bio-Design for Portability (BD4P)

8 July 2019

Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge, UK

Organised by Paolo Zuliani.

The workshop consisted in five talks by synthetic biology experts that addressed both experimental and in silico (computational) problems related to bio-design portability. The opening talk presented novel methods for characterising the interaction between genetic circuits and host cell (Gorochowski). The following talk focussed on reproducibility and comparability of measurements (Beal). The third experimental talk introduced new reporter systems for sensing stress in the cell, including the metabolic burden (Smith). In the computational domain, we started with a presentation of efficient algorithms for multi-objective metabolic engineering based on a game-theoretic approach (Jiang), and we concluded with a talk on heuristics for selecting scaffold sequences for in-cell DNA origami folding (Shirt-Ediss).

The workshop attracted about a dozen researchers from institutions in Denmark, South Korea, UK, and USA.

The workshop was sponsored by the EPSRC Portabolomics project.