Synthetic Biology Interdisciplinary Research Team Challenges
Overview
At the conference, participants are divided into twelve* interdisciplinary research teams. The groups will spend nine hours over three days exploring diverse challenges that are related to Synthetic Biology and are at the interface between science, engineering, and medicine.
The objectives of the interdisciplinary teams are to spur new thinking, to have people from different disciplines interact and to forge new scientific contacts across disciplines. Participants are placed on one interdisciplinary research team and remain in that group for the entire conference. Each group spends a good portion of the conference developing a possible scientific plan to solve an outstanding challenge posed to it. The composition of the groups is intentionally diverse, including researchers from science, engineering and medicine, as well as representatives from public and private funding organizations, university and government leadership and science journals.
On Saturday morning, the interdisciplinary research teams will give a short report out (5-6 minutes each group) to share where they are with addressing the challenge. A more extensive report-out will be provided on Sunday morning (about 12 minutes including Q&A).
Each interdisciplinary research team will include a graduate student in a university science writing program. Based on the group interaction and the final briefings, the students will write a group summary, which will be reviewed by the group members. These summaries will describe the problem and outline the approach taken, including what research needs to be done to understand the fundamental science behind the challenge, the proposed plan for engineering the application, the reasoning that went into it and the benefits to society of the problem solution. The summaries will be available on the Web and as a publication Synthetic Biology: Building on Nature's Inspiration through National Academies Press.
*Although there are only nine challenges, there will be twelve teams because the most requested topics will have two or three groups addressing the challenges.
Synthetic Biology Interdisciplinary Research (IDR) Team Challenge Summaries
IDR Challenge 1: What new foundational technologies and tools are required to make biology easier to engineer?
IDR Challenge 2: What are the significant differences, if any, between risk assessment capacity and religious analyses of the moral permissibility for synthetic biology applications and other biotechnology applications?
IDR Challenge 3: Reconstructing gene circuitry: How can synthetic biology lead us to an understanding of the principles underlying natural genetic circuits and to the discovery of new biology?
IDR Challenge 4: Designing communities of cells: How do we create communication and collaboration between cells to allow for specialization and division of labor?
IDR Challenge 5: Why are human-designed biological circuits and devices fragile and inaccurate relative to their natural counterparts?
IDR Challenge 6: How can genomics be leveraged to develop coherent approaches for rapidly exploring the biochemical diversity in and engineering of non-model organisms?
IDR Challenge 7: How do we move beyond genetics to engage chemical and physical approaches to synthetic biology?
IDR Challenge 8: What is the role of evolution and evolvability in synthetic biology?
IDR Challenge 9: How do we maximally capitalize on the promise of synthetic biology?
