Biofilms are commonly known as the slime-producing bacterial communities sitting on stones in streams, dirty pipes and drains, or dental plaque. However, Wyss Core Faculty member Neel Joshi is putting to work the very properties that make biofilms effective nuisances or threats in our daily lives. In this episode of Disruptive, Joshi and postdoctoral fellow Anna Duraj-Thatte discuss the development of a novel protein engineering system called BIND, Biofilm-Integrated Nanofiber Display, which uses biofilms to help clean up polluted rivers, manufacture pharmaceutical products, and fabricate new textiles.

Disruptive: Putting Biofilms to Work

Good morning! This is the inaugural Sunday morning podcast for Compassionate Technologies. For the months of June and July we are talking about Medicine - today focusing on the trend of drug design in pharmaceuticals. Enjoy!

(1/4) Trends in Medicine: Drug Design Re-Emerges With Potential to Lower Pharma Costs

If you're into the biosciences, you've heard about CRISPR. Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) and its Cas9 nucleases were discovered as part of bacterial immune systems in the 1970s; only in 2012 were they refined into a powerful gene-editing technology. Previous gene-editing techniques required customized proteins for each gene sequence, an expensive and error-prone process. For CRISPR, changing a 20-nucleotide gRNA sequence is "ridiculously simple" and can be done online, says Medvedik.

(3/4) Get Your Genes #Turnt Up and Off with CRISPR

In episode fifteen of season two, we talk about Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, we take a listener question about unbalanced data, plus we talk with Doug Eck of Google’s Magenta project. 

(3/4) Get Your Genes #Turnt Up and Off with CRISPR

Olivia Jeffers

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