Life’s Lego: building synthetic life brick for brick

The Lustrum committee of study association Alchimica organizes a symposium about synthetic biology, celebrating the 40th anniversary of Molecular Life Sciences. What are the building bricks of life? Can we create life from scratch in the laboratory? Synthetic biology tries to answer those questions.

Beatrix Süss (University of Frankfurt), Eörs Szathmáry (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest) and Dominik Niopek (iGEM Team) will tell us about the most recent developments. Think of completely new proteins like RNA switches, synthesizing an organism from its DNA sequence and new insights in evolution. The general idea is to create new biological functions and systems. The ethical questions about this topic will be discussed by Lei Pei, researcher at IDC in Austria.

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13:00 Doors open
13:15 Opening and Introduction - Vitor Martins dos Santos
13:50 iGEM - Dominik Niopek

14:25 break

14:40 Evolution and Synthetic Biology - Eors Szathmary
15:15 Synthetic RNA switches - Beatrix Suess

15:50 break

16:05 Risk assesment of Synthetic Biology - Lei Pei
16:40 Conclusion

There will be drinks afterwards!