Superb event coming up in a few months time:

BioSysBio 2007
Bioinformatics, System Biology, Synthetic Biology
Incorporating the Young Bioinformatics Forum

11th Jan - 13th Jan, 2007 Manchester, UK

BioSysBio 2007 will be held at the Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre. It is aimed at students, post-docs and junior faculty working in biotechnology and all are welcome to attend. The conference will include sessions in Computational Systems Biology, Bioinformatics and Synthetic Biology. The new session in Synthetic Biology hopes to highlight some of the European entries in the MIT based International Genetically Engineered Machines competition (iGEM)

The deadline for abstracts for both the YBF and main event is 15th September. Abstract submission is entirely electronic and can be done from this page: http://www.biosysbio.com/cgi-bin/show_abstracts.cgi

For further details visit http://www.biosysbio.com/

Hi there,

Could you elaborate on what the definition of "synthetic biology" is at this point in time? What is the state of the art? What kinds of things would we likely be seeing demonstrated at a conference like this? Is the primary purpose to construct things (e.g. clever oil-eating/producing bacteria) or to understand biological systems?

It sounds fantastic, please fill us in.

You could have asked me an easier question :P

My understanding is the design and creation of biological systems/parts. Now this could not be achieved without a good understanding of the system, so this is also part and parcel. I really cant give you any information on the "state of the art" as unfortunately this is not my field.

As for the conference itself, it is too early for me to say what exactly will be demonstrated. We will however be having two keynote speakers from the field. Chris Voight from UCSD, and Randy Rettberg - MIT.

You can get more information at the following site. I will get back to you if I have any further information.

http://syntheticbiology.org/

http://icampus.mit.edu/projects/iGem.shtml (We will be having a session for this)

Hope that helps (apologies for the typos)

In can't be on all meetings, but can i ask here, in Poland you are organizing some meetings with scientists too?