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Synthetic Biology: Important Links and Applications for Bioinformatics

Previous work of my own has led to this database, which examines various biological

circuits and the resulting engineering properties.

At MIT, important molecular circuits and their descriptions are bundled and made

available to the general public as a “repository”, i.e. a collection of construction manuals.

There is also a race for the 3D printers to get and program better and better instructions

for such three-dimensional printer templates. It is also possible to print various cells and

tissues. Finally, people are also trying to make a 3-D printer themselves with a 3-D printer.

I’m somewhat skeptical of the latter enterprise, but it’s amusing to read (because of the

danger of overly active self-reproducing machines, but also because of fundamental limi­

tations of this approach, e.g. plastic remains plastic, other components are missing).

The possibilities of DNA as an extremely good and very compact digital storage for

information are explained in the film. The concept was first demonstrated using Next

Generation Sequencing by Church et  al. (2012). Ultra-long storage was published by

Grass et  al. (2015), and the encoding of images, sounds, and texts was analyzed by

Goldman et al. (2013). Thus, image files can be effortlessly determined from long DNA

sequences using double sequencing and next generation sequencing.

GoSynthetic Database

https://gosyn.bioapps.biozentrum.uni-­wuerzburg.de/index.php

MIT BioBricks

https://biobricks.org/

Rep-Repro/Darwin 3-D Printer

Rep-Repro/Darwin 3-D Printer: https://bigrep.com/de/

“Eternal” (Thousands or Millions of Years) Permanent Storage via DNA

DNA storage: https://www.3sat.de/wissen/nano/dna-­als-­datenspeicher-­100.html

13.8  Using the Language of Life Technically with the Help of Synthetic Biology