Wednesday Nite at the Lab

media release: WN@TL goes hybrid both with Zoom and with in-person (Room 1111) presentations. The zoom registration link is still go.wisc.edu/240r59. You can also watch a live web stream at on YouTube.

A message from Tom Zinnen: I am happy to share that I will retire as of the end of the Q&A session following Scott Coyle’s talk on November 1 at Wednesday Nite @ The Lab. The WN@TL series will continue for two additional weeks beyond that. However, the Division of Extension has decided to pull back the 0.75 FTE that has authorized & funded ¾ of my appointment at the Biotech Center since I started on June 1, 1991.  This means that the Biotech Center will not be able to replace my position, and therefore WN@TL will go into indefinite hiatus following the November 15 talk. 

Next week we get to say Yes to November as Scott Coyle of Biochemistry asks “What Are Cells…and Could They Be More?”

Earlier this month, he won a NIH Director’s New Innovator Award for his research on using synthetic biology to design protein circuits.  As Renata Solan writes, such circuits are “networks of proteins that interact to induce a new function in a cell. These circuits can be designed to help scientists understand cellular processes by emitting structured data about cellular form and function that is comparatively easy to measure and analyze.

Coyle’s work aims to broaden the ways researchers are able to ask questions about the dynamic patterns of biochemical activity that cells coordinate. Those patterns impact the development, growth, and health of cells.”

You might want to check out the colorful video of moving cells, found half-way down on this site: https://www.coylelab.org/research

In some parts of the video the cells visually thrum, and it’s not like anything I’ve seen before. 

Description:  All living things are made of “cells” — but what exactly is a cell, and what can we learn from them? In this talk, I will discuss how and why cells are the basic structural and functional units of all life on earth. We will then re-imagine the idea of the cell from completely different vantage points: as a chemical computer, as a manufacturing plant, or even as a microscopic robot we can reprogram from the ground up. By viewing living systems as “technology” as opposed to just “biology”, we will explore how cells might serve as the foundation for a new biologically-powered future.

Bio: Scott Coyle did his undergraduate training with Jennifer Doudna at the University of California, Berkeley. He completed his PhD in Biochemistry as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow with Wendell Lim at the University of California San Francisco, where his research at the intersection of biochemistry, signaling, and evolution was recognized with a Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award. He was a founding scientist at the successful immune-cell engineering startup CellDesignLabs, before doing post-doctoral work as a Helen Hay Whitney Fellow with Manu Prakash at Stanford University. His own group uses synthetic biology to develop biochemical programming interfaces that expand our ability to understand and engineer dynamic cell biology, with a major focus on novel synthetic circuits that self-organize molecules in space and time. He is the recipient of an NIH New Innovator Award, a Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering and is a Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow.

More to Explore: http://coylelab.org/