Research lab
Harvard research institute developing bioinspired technologies, spanning synthetic biology, DNA nanotechnology, tissue engineering, and robotics.
Harvard's lung-on-a-chip has nearly 5,400 citations since 2010, but most non-animal test methods have yet to be rigorously tested, IEEE Spectrum reports. Validation means head-to-head runs against animal experiments, so animal data remains the yardstick for now.
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William Shih's group at the Wyss Institute and Dana-Farber has published a computational framework in Nature Communications for crisscross DNA megastructures, aimed at the unwanted-binding problem Shih says keeps the method in a few labs.
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Enhanced rock weathering's problem has always been rate rather than chemistry, and a Nature Biotechnology result attacks the rate directly. The 2.6-fold gain was measured on kilograms of mineral in a flow reactor.
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A pilot bioreactor running on unprocessed seawater and acetate pulled 0.50 grams of CO2 a day out of the air from 4 kilograms of rock, a modest number obtained by direct measurement in a tank rather than by inference from a field plot.
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The 2.6-fold speedup came from deleting the microbe's own off switch. That leaves the hard part of this work to whoever writes the discharge permit for a basin full of it.
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Harvard's Church lab reports AGENTEX in Nature: engineered tRNAs and ribosomes in a cell-free mix. Nobody has to recode an organism to prototype a genetic code any more.
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