Synthetic biology can be used in industrial biotechnology to engineer metabolic pathways to create high-value chemicals using model microorganisms such as yeast. During the Synthetic Biology in Action course, participants engineered yeast to produce beta-caretone for industrial biotechnology purposes. In this talk, they describe the steps they took to engineer an existing yeast pathway to produce the new chemical. These steps include modeling the metabolic pathway outputs, DNA design, amplification, and assembly, and analysis of the final result.
As we move through the world, we have an innate sense of how things feel -- the sensations they produce on our skin and how our bodies orient to them. Can technology leverage this? In this fun, fascinating TED-Ed lesson, learn about the field of haptics, and how it could change everything from the way we shop online to how dentists learn the telltale feel of a cavity.