Synthetic Biology: A Lab Manual (Second Edition)

The first edition of this book was the first manual for laboratory work in the rapidly expanding field of synthetic biology. Based upon a highly successful university course by one of the pioneers in synthetic biology, the manual became particularly popular with students of the enormous annual international Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition. Questions at the time included the scalability of BioBrick cloning, how to stabilize chromoprotein expression and change the colors, and how to adapt methods for high schools and biohackers. A decade later, this second edition answers these questions with huge BioBrick constructs (front cover), next-generation less-toxic chromoproteins in a kit, and ultraviolet-light-free quantitation by smartphones. Further updates include a computational modeling lab and new avenues in SynBio.

Anthony C Forster (MD, Harvard; B.Sc.Hons., PhD in Biochemistry, Adelaide) is a professor researching synthetic biology at the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology, Uppsala University, Sweden. He discovered the hammerhead catalytic RNA structure, authored patents that founded two biotech companies, edited synthetic biology volumes of Methods and Biotechnology J, and created the synthetic biology lab course detailed in this manual.

Letian Bao (B.Biotech., Jilin, China; M.Biol., Uppsala) is a PhD student in Prof. Forster's lab at the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology, Uppsala University, Sweden. He engineered chromoproteins to overcome their limitations and improve the lab course.

Josefine Liljeruhm (M.Sc. in Molecular Biotechnology and PhD in Cell and Molecular Biology, Uppsala) is a Senior System Engineer at Cytiva, Uppsala. As a PhD student in Prof. Forster's lab, she set up and taught the lab course detailed in this manual and characterized the chromoproteins.