Darwin on steroids: Bio design, diversity & selection

30 September videos (review5 on vimeo, lesson6 on vimeo) - George Church (Harvard/MIT)

• class slides here

From goals to practical choices. Design tools. Classes of genetic/protein modules. Assignment: Build a library from DNA chips.

Wang HH, Kim H, Cong L, Jeong J, Bang D, Church GM (2012) Genome-scale Promoter Engineering by Coselection MAGE. Nature Methods.

Goodman DB, Church GM, Kosuri S (2013) Causes and effects of N-terminal codon bias in bacterial genes. Science 342:475-9. PMID: 24072823

In class we discussed the idea of a “Human Genome Project 2.0”, but instead of reading DNA, writing DNA. For your homework, please answer each of the following questions:

(1) If humanity were to undertake such a project, what would be the benefits? What types of new science and engineering would be enabled if we had such a synthetic human genome? Please provide specific examples.

(2) Conversely, why might we not want to proceed with such an endeavor? What are the risks?

(3) Map out a technical strategy for synthesizing a human genome. What technologies would be required? What are existing tools we could leverage? For certain tools that do not exist, what should their capabilities be?