Lens on Labs: SynBio Research Talks

About


Lens on Labs 2.0 is an all-encompassing kickstarter to synthetic biology and its unending prospects. With iGEM Competition track-based symposiums, it aims to build cognizance around SynBio-based opportunities and advancements, while also providing a forum for collaborative discussions by experts in the field!

2023 Sessions


Fixing CO2 by Integrating the Best of Chemistry and Synthetic Biology

The capability of synthetic biology to regulate the rapid carbon cycle, and consequently alleviate climate change is tremendous. The Netherlands' Laboratory of Microbiology is home to Dr. Nico J. Claassens. His team is particularly interested in designing synthetic routes that effectively utilise CO2 and other one-carbon substrates including formate and methanol as sustainable, next-generation feedstocks. His work also focuses on optimising the expression of proteins (including membrane proteins and enzymes) using randomization and rational design techniques that target codon usage and gene regulatory elements.

With Climate Crisis as a new village addition to the iGEM Competition, be sure to catch the talk to gain insights on approaches that amalgamate sustainable solutions with synthetic biology!

2022 Sessions


Molecular Farming in Plant System : The Future Prospect of Agricultural Biotechnology


Plant molecular farming (PMF) concept is harnessing the potential of plants as biological factories to produce high molecular products, such as recombinant proteins and valuable metabolites. There are many molecular farming products that have been commercialized to produce diagnostic proteins, therapeutic proteins, vaccines, and small molecules. The benefit of plant-based molecular farming encompasses a realistic alternative expression system and provides a practical solution to address massive production of biopharmaceutical products, including cost-effective technology and eliminate possible contamination with human pathogens. Nowadays technological developments of PMF have been improved on many levels, ranging from genetic transformation methods to the use of different crops as production platforms. Increasing the accumulation of molecular farming products is one of the important strategies that has to be developed. Here, several case studies of PMF platforms and the challenges that might be hampered in agricultural biotechnology.

Everyday Synbio For All


The cost of Gene therapy in 2019 ran $2.5M per dose. Reading human
genomes in 2004 was 3 billion dollars and extremely low quality (haploid and diploid). But today these are $300 and $2, respectively, thanks to SynBio (broadly speaking). This exponential continues, impacting vaccines, foods, cells resistant to all viruses and enhanced organs for transplantation, aging reversal, climate change and endangered species.

Targeted protein degradation using ubiquitin variant induced proximity


Dr Wei Zhang who is currently working as assistant professor in department of molecular and cellular biology , University of Guelph and is currently appointed in the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Humans & The Microbiome program as an Azrieli Global Scholar.In July 2018, Dr zhang started his own research group and has been working on development of synthetic biology approaches to manipulate human cell signal transduction cascades to identify new molecular mechanisms and innovative therapeutic strategies with his team. His lab employs synthetic biology and protein engineering approaches to systematically generate probes modulating protein activity in normal and diseased cells, aiming to validate the drug targets and develop innovative therapeutics.

2021 Sessions


Introduction and Application of Synthetic Biology in everyday life


Dr. Karthik Raman is an Associate Professor at the Department of Biotechnology, Bhupat and Jyoti Mehta School of Biosciences, Indian Institute of Technology Madras. Karthik’s research group at IIT Madras works on the development of algorithms and computational tools to understand, predict and manipulate complex biological networks. Broadly spanning computational aspects of synthetic and systems biology, key areas of research in his group encompass microbiome analysis, in silico metabolic engineering, biological network design and biological data analysis. Karthik also coordinates the Centre for Integrative Biology and Systems Medicine (IBSE) at IIT Madras and is a core member of the Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (RBC-DSAI). Karthik teaches courses on computational biology and systems biology at IIT Madras, and

Introduction and Application of Synthetic Biology in everyday life - From an editor's point of view


Ross joined Nature Communications in November 2014 and is part of their biotechnology team, handling manuscripts in genome engineering and synthetic biology. Like many synthetic biologists, he came to the field from other areas of molecular biology – in his case from an academic background in DNA damage and repair at the University of Sussex. Alongside the wet-lab science, he’s keenly interested in the social and ethical aspects of engineering biology.

Responding to Disease Outbreaks Using Synthetic Biology - Enabled Diagnostics


Alexander A. Green is an Assistant Professor in the Biomedical Engineering Department at Boston University. The Green lab pursues interdisciplinary research in areas spanning synthetic biology, diagnostics, and nanotechnology. His lab employs computational design to engineer RNA molecules that sense and amplify molecular cues to develop diagnostic assays that are portable, low cost, and easy to use. They also employ RNA to construct biological circuits that operate in living cells. He is an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Computational & Evolutionary Molecular Biology (2017) and the recipient of an NIH New Innovator Award (2017), a DARPA Young Faculty Award (2017), a DARPA Young Faculty Award Director’s Fellowship (2019), and an Arizona Biomedical Research Commission New Investigator Award (2017).

Engineering Biology Outside – Realizing Sustainability and Ensuring Safety


Eric Young is the Leonard P. Kinnicutt Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. His research objective is to understand and engineer novel microbial systems that improve the human condition, focusing primarily on the unique phenotypes and metabolism of fungi. Because synthetic biology is so underdeveloped in these organisms, Dr. Young and his collaborators are addressing multiple areas of need – genetic design aids, methods development, genomics data acquisition and workflows, modular parts collections, and pathway engineering. This research program informs his educational goal - to train the current and future workforce for an economy shaped by engineered biology. In recognition and support of these efforts, Dr. Young received a 2019 NSF CAREER award and a 2019 Massachusetts Life Sciences Center Building Breakthroughs award.

Application of Synthetic Genomics for Human and Animal Health


Eric Young is the Leonard P. Kinnicutt Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. His research objective is to understand and engineer novel microbial systems that improve the human condition, focusing primarily on the unique phenotypes and metabolism of fungi. Because synthetic biology is so underdeveloped in these organisms, Dr. Young and his collaborators are addressing multiple areas of need – genetic design aids, methods development, genomics data acquisition and workflows, modular parts collections, and pathway engineering. This research program informs his educational goal - to train the current and future workforce for an economy shaped by engineered biology. In recognition and support of these efforts, Dr. Young received a 2019 NSF CAREER award and a 2019 Massachusetts Life Sciences Center Building Breakthroughs award.

Organizers


Junyue Chen
Junyue Chen
linkedin
Beijing,China
Mirudula Elanchezhian
Mirudula Elanchezhian
linkedin
Mohali, India
Gyanaranjan Parida
Gyanaranjan Parida
linkedin
2021 Organizer
Berhampur, India
Tejas Borkar
Tejas Borkar
linkedin
Project Head
Nanded, India
Suhani Kabra
Suhani Kabra
linkedin
Project Head
India
Gokul Bhaskaran
Gokul Bhaskaran
linkedin
Project Member
Krakow, Poland
Farrel Alfaza Marsetyo
Farrel Alfaza Marsetyo
linkedin
Project Member
Sleman, Indonesia
Neha Suresh
Neha Suresh
linkedin
Project Member
Raleigh, NC, United States of America
Purna Chandra Sekhar Vakudavathu
Purna Chandra Sekhar Vakudavathu
linkedin
Project Member
Hyderabad, India
Naomi Thomas
Naomi Thomas
linkedin
Project Member
Karnataka, India
Swaranjeet Singh
Swaranjeet Singh
Project Member
Delhi, India