Professor Luis Serrano, coordinator of MycoSynVac and Director of the CRG in Barcelona, gave a talk last Thursday November 16th at the University Miguel Hernandez in Elche, during an event organized for Sant Albert’s Day, the patron saint of natural scientists. The talk, entitled “Synthetic Biology: a minimal cell model and its design as intelligent drug”, dealt with how the synthetic biology is changing somehow the way we are facing nowadays some challenges such as drug development, environmental problems, food production, fuels or electronics.
In the plenaty talk, mainly attended by students and professors of the Faculty of Experimental Science, he showed some of the tools SynBio provides in order to engineer microorganisms for different meaning, focusing in how MycoSynVac is facing the challenge to engineer Mycoplasma pneumoniae in order to design a universal chassis that can be deployed as a vaccine, initially in a range of animal hosts, and then, why not, in humans.
The talk dealt not only with the scientific developments involved in the project, but also addressed other aspects such as the ethical implications of synthetic biology.