Sunday, September 11, 2005

FEBS course on Modular Protein Domains

I am attending a FEBS course in Seefeld Austria on Modular Protein Domains.
I would like to highlight so far the short talk of Rune Linding on synthetic biology. He is working in the lab of Tony Pawson trying to develop a pipeline of generation of functional proteins from combination of domains.

One possible important outcome of this meeting might be the definition of some common cloning strategies and sharing of wet lab databases of cloned "parts". This will allow for an "open source" type of synthetic biology where everyone will be able to take advantage and built on top of other people's work. This would speed up innovation in a field that so far has produced interesting results of yet little useful applications.