Pizza at 12.45pm, talk starts at 1pm prompt

Speakers: WirEd – the University of Edinburgh's 2014 iGEM team with an introduction from Prof. Alistair Elfick

Abstract: 
Smart bacteria could be the computers of the future – but first we have to wire them together. This year Edinburgh is excited to introduce metabolic wiring to iGEM, a novel way for connecting logic gates in different bacterial strains. Metabolic wires are a new way of connecting logic gates in different cells – their orthogonality and extensibility means there is potentially no limit to how intelligent a population of bacteria can be. We set out to make three sets of metabolic wires, using trans-genic aromatic enzymes, cis-genic aromatic genes, and ‘sugar logic.’ We also set out to build a population regulation system to showcase these wires, and a new set of degrons to make the system more robust.    

About the speakers:
The iGEM team is hand-selected from the very best Biology, Informatics and Engineering undergraduates. The 10 members have spent the summer dreaming, designing and building a piece of bespoke biology. At the start of November the team will present their work to 244 other teams of undergrads gathered in Boston from across the globe. Alistair just likes to hang out with the cool kids…
 
For more on iGEM see: http://2014.igem.org