The symposium aimed to provide a thorough overview of current advances in ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ synthetic biology, and established a link to the latest developments in the field of materials synthesis for health and other applications.
From 29 September to 1 October, leading researchers from all over the world met in Dresden reporting recent findings and discussing future perspectives of these two highly active research fields. Highlights included, for example, lectures by Matthias Lutolf (EPF Lausanne, Switzerland), who described new options of synthetic cell-instructive hydrogels to direct organogenesis in vitro, and Claudia Fischbach-Teschl (Cornell University, Ithaka, USA), reporting models to decipher extracellular matrix cues in tumor formation and metastasis.
Roy Bar-Ziv (Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel) fascinated the audience with
programmable on-chip DNA compartments as artificial cells, and Wilfried Weber University
Freiburg) provided impressive insights into the application of smart biohybrid materials at the interface of synthetic biology and chemistry.
The Max Bergmann Center of Biomaterials unifies researchers from the Institute of Materials Science at TU Dresden and the Leibniz-Institut für Polymerforschung Dresden working on biology-inspired materials. B CUBE, Center for Molecular Bioengineering at TU Dresden, is a BMBF Innovation Center (ZIK) focusing on the investigation of living structures on a molecular level, and on translating the ensuing knowledge into innovative technologies.
Contact
Carsten Werner
Leibniz-Institut für Polymerforschung Dresden e.V., Max-Bergmann-Zentrum für Biomaterialien & TU Dresden, Chair for Biofunctional Polymer Materials
Hohe Str. 6, 01069 Dresden, Germany
Tel.: + 49 351 4658 531,
Fax: + 49 351 4658 533
email: werner@ipfdd.de
Nils Kröger
B CUBE – Center for Molecular Bioengineering, TU Dresden
Arnoldstr. 18, 01307 Dresden, Germany
Tel.: + 49 351 463 43010,
Fax: + 49 351 463 40322
email: kroeger@bcube-dresden.de