Lightning Talk

The food supply chain is a complex network of producers, processors, and retailers. Within this complex and evolving network, there are many opportunities for the insurance industry to provide insurance products that support this globally connected infrastructure. But what if we could use synthetic biology as a risk mitigation tool to increase the traceability of food products? Come and listen to Vishaal (CEO at Aanika Biosciences) sharing his vision about how engineered microorganisms can improve food safety in the supply chain, reducing the cost of food/recall and contamination insurance by filling in gaps with existing insurance products coverage.

Automation and lab data connectivity are creating haves and have-nots in the biotech space. There are no guides for how to assemble the right data infrastructure nor how to invest your resources in data technologies. Techbios often have significant bioinformatics firepower, but neglect their wet lab operations or focus solely on workcells. Customization is key to synthetic biology - what if we could apply it not just to build your cells, but also to build the right infrastructure to unlock the full potential of your lab data? Join us as we introduce Ganymede's novel approach for automating scientists' work by connecting wet lab assays with ELNs, LIMS, and analytical software, and cover learnings that we've seen hands-on with companies at the bleeding edge of R&D data innovation.

Next generation sequencing and affordable, high quality DNA synthesis have enabled a new era of protein engineering. Novel proteins guided by both computational and natural design can now be generated quickly. Typically, protein expression is done in vivo, requiring days before obtaining purified protein suitable for analysis. This bottleneck slows down the desired high-throughput design-build-test-learn process. Increasingly, cell-free protein expression systems capable of transcription-translation (TXTL) have enabled researchers to remove this bottleneck allowing analysis of protein function within hours, not days. Cell-free systems are utilized in an increasing number of applications, including bacteriophage rebooting, gene circuits, microfluidics, and artificial cells.