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This month we discuss synbio, regulation, and science advocacy with Professor Trevor Charles. Dr. Charles has been a professor in the department of biology at the University of Waterloo for 20 years and has been a strong advocate for synthetic biology research, both at Waterloo and in Canada. He is also the co-founder and CSO of Metagenom Bio Inc., which develops and commercializes microbiome solutions in environment and agriculture.

Although the potential for cell-free platforms is high, it is necessary to address the potential misuse of cell-free systems and develop a strategy to mitigate the threat of suspicious users. This is where Chris Isaac, a member of the U of L iGEM team, comes in. Isaac identified that the flexibility of cell-free systems makes them highly amenable to genetic recoding, where canonical relationships between codons and anticodons are not necessarily consistent.

“I engineer biological systems (such as tiny proteins) to make novel potential medicines. One of the global health challenges I have targeted through my research is that of antibiotic resistance. With my collaborators around the world, I have provided an array of solutions to combat drug-resistant infections.”

While the scientific community and now much of the public is excited about CRISPR/Cas9, some synthetic biologists like Western University’s Dr. David Edgell are working away at creating the next generation of DNA-editing tools. As Associate Professor and now Acting Chair of Western’s Biochemistry Department, Edgell is engineering nucleases “to make them bigger, better, stronger…more accurate, and having a more defined function.”