A bumpy road ahead for genetic biocontainment.

While the research community continues to develop novel proposals for intrinsic biocontainment of genetically engineered organisms, translation to real-world deployment faces several challenges.

Weighing up the evidence used by direct-to-consumer stem cell businesses.

Hundreds of businesses across the United States offer direct-to-consumer stem-cell-based interventions that have not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Here, we characterize the types of evidence used on the websites of 59 stem cell businesses in the Southwest United States to market their services. We identify over a dozen forms of evidence, noting that businesses are less likely to rely on "gold-standard" scientific evidence, like randomized clinical trials, and instead draw substantially on forms of evidence that we identify as being "ambiguous.

Exploring presentations of sustainability by US synthetic biology companies.

The field of synthetic biology is increasingly being positioned as a key driver of a more sustainable, bio-based economy, and has seen rapid industry growth over the past 15 years. In this paper we undertake an exploratory investigation of the relationship between sustainability and synthetic biology, identifying and analyzing sustainability-related language on the public websites of 24, US-based synthetic biology companies. We observe that sustainability is a visible part of the self-presentation of the nascent synthetic biology industry, explicitly mentioned by 18 of the 24 companies.

Building a biofoundry.

A biofoundry provides automation and analytics infrastructure to support the engineering of biological systems. It allows scientists to perform synthetic biology and aligned experimentation on a high-throughput scale, massively increasing the solution space that can be examined for any given problem or question. However, establishing a biofoundry is a challenging undertaking, with numerous technical and operational considerations that must be addressed.

Characterizing Direct-to-Consumer Stem Cell Businesses in the Southwest United States.

There are currently hundreds of businesses across the United States offering direct-to-consumer stem cell treatments that have not been through regulatory approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Here, we provide a detailed characterization of nearly 170 stem cell businesses operating in the Southwest United States. We draw specific attention to two as-yet understudied facets of these businesses.

Tools for anti-inflammatory drug design: in vitro models of leukocyte migration.

Inhibiting leukocyte recruitment is now a major focus in the design of novel anti-inflammatory drugs. Following the identification of lead compounds from conventional high-throughput screens using appropriate receptors or enzymes, it is important to validate the action of the compounds in a suitable in vitro model of leukocyte migration. Here, we review a range of different experimental approaches to modelling leukocyte migration, and identify the multi-well filter migration assay as the best compromise between the amount of resources required to screen multiple compounds and the amount of information gained about the effects of the compounds on cell movement behavior.