The HHMI/NSF sponsored workshop on using synthetic biology as an undergraduate teaching tool has finished.  I am really glad I came to this.  I learned about some impressive new tools, Golden Gate Assembly, GoldenBraid Cloning, C-dogs for uniform gene expression control, reasons to use doubled translation termination sites in plasmid design, The Oligator, new long strand cheap oligo synthesis technologies, just to name a few.  And a lot of good ideas to use both in teaching and research.  We put together 10 minute presentations that are proposals for ways we might use synthetic biology teaching at our home institutions and presented them today.  I teamed up with Mark Wilson of Humboldt State University and we presented something about using Vibrio bacteria as a marine model in synthetic biology.  I have already uploaded a version (edited for clarity---this is not the cleanest presentation I have made but go easy on me---it was put together quickly in a very short amount of time as a part of the workshop) of our presentation to the posted presentations page.

There were also some other impressive presentations.  One that I really liked was a way to use plasmid construction as a random number generator.  Generating random numbers is actually quite difficult to do well using software on a computer, but it may turn out to be easy using the orientation of a promoter with two reporters and a FACs machine (fluorescent activated cell sorter)!  The same group also suggested using a mix of transformed bacteria colonies to simulate genetic drift and/or selection with repeated sampling and plating.  There was another presentation on using E. coli to produce wintergreen to prevent colony collapse disorder (due to mites) in honeybees.    And also a presentation on designing bacteria for rapid, efficient, and specific gun residue detection at crime scenes, etc.