Coronavirus information for participants
The onsite course and conference programme at EMBL has been paused until the end of June 2020.
We aim to continue offering our advanced training for the scientific community however we safely can. While some events have been cancelled, many have been rescheduled for a later date and others will be delivered as virtual events.
Registration is open for onsite courses and conferences starting after 1 July and for the virtual events. All registration fees for any events which don’t take place due to the COVID-19 disruption are fully refundable.
More information for participants of events at EMBL Heidelberg can be found here.
The bus schedule is available here, the on-site handout here, and the poster session overview here.
Conference Overview
Most engineered systems in biology are inspired by natural systems. Many achievements in synthetic biology that we have witnessed in the past decade, directly or indirectly, resulted from studies that were carried out in the context of basic/fundamental biology, the purposes of which were not engineering but understanding. A few examples are the natural regulatory response of the cell to its environment inspired the development of synthetic regulatory circuits, the understanding of cellular networks led the way to the optimisation of host strain for bioproduction and the CRISPR-Cas immunity system of bacteria and archaea opened new possibilities to reroute cell programs for new purposes.
Our workshop fosters the trust that creating is understanding. We have prepared a programme with four themes that are geared toward basic research while being at the forefront of synthetic biology. We start by asking how engineering can be used as an interpretive framework to biology, we then probe how biology can be interfaced with the non living (e.g. electronic devices, software), we next explore how synthetic biology can be used to reconstruct cellular systems (minimal, genome, and consortia) and we close by questioning how other biology is possible through engineering.
Session Topics
- Engineering as an interpretative frame for biology
- Interfacing biology with our software and hardware
- Engineering for understanding
- Other biology is possible
The related EMBO Practical Course: Synthetic Biology in Action: Bridging Natural/Non-Natural will take place 15 - 22 Sep 2019
