Meet The Speaker
“Changing Chasses and Inventing Elements: Developing a combined systems biology and engineering approach to designing complex function in cells.”
Dr. Adam Arkin is Division Director of the Physical Biosciences Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a Full Professor in the Department of Bioengineering, U.C. Berkeley. He is Director of the Synthetic Biology Institute launched this year at Berkeley and Co-Director of the BIOFAB: International Open Facility Advancing Biotechnology (BIOFAB). In addition, he directs the Joint Bioenergy Institute’s Bioinformatics Group and Berkeley Lab’s Virtual Institute of Microbial Stress. He is a Professor of Bioengineering at the University of California (UC), Berkeley and was an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) until 2007. Prof. Arkin has served on many academic and government committees including the US Air Force Science Advisory Board and the Defense Science Study Group.
The thrust of Arkin’s research has focused on developing the physical theory, computational tools and experimental approaches for understanding cellular processes critical to life. The goal is to provide a framework that will facilitate the design and engineering of new functions and behaviors in cells through synthetic and systems biology.
Last year Prof. Arkin led the launch of the Synthetic Biology Institute (SBI) with Agilent as the Founding Industrial Partner. SBI brings together scientists working on the foundations and applications of biological design from the University and National Laboratory. He developed and co-taught an Introduction to Synthetic Biology course with Ron Weiss from MIT, which was video linked between the two campuses. The course was so popular it has been picked up by a consortium of 10 schools who will also receive the video feed while Profs. Arkin and Weiss teach. In 2010/11, Arkin published 14 papers laying an initial foundation for predictable programmable gene expression engineering in bacteria with advanced simulation, molecular characterization, and novel molecular “components” similar, in spirit to gate logics in electronics.
Note: Light lunch will be served starting at 11:45am.
Seminar Abstract
“Changing Chasses and Inventing Elements: Developing a combined systems biology and engineering approach to designing complex function in cells.”
To meet the goal of creating reliable, predictable, efficient, and transparent methods to harness cellular capabilities for human benefit, it is necessary both to have standard libraries of elements from which useful pathways can be constructed and an understanding of the how host physiology and the environment impacts the functioning of these heterologous circuits. We show how variations in cellular and environmental context affect the operation of the basic central dogma functions underlying gene expression. Then we describe progress on creating a complete, scalable, and relatively homogeneous and designable sets of part families that can control central dogma function predictably in the face of varying configurations, genetic contexts, and environments.
