Cientificos.pe is a non-profit organization that aims to support upcoming and current Peruvian scientists. They recently featured our very own Maria Villegas Kcam, who grew up in Piura, Peru. To see the full thread, click the link below!

Translation: "Good morning science lovers! For our #peruvianpaper and scientific profile of this week, we want to share an article published in @NAR_Open by @MaClaVK #PeruScience"

This past weekend, the lab travelled to Northwestern University to attend the Central US Synthetic Biology Workshop. We were proud to present our research during the poster sessions and lightning talks:

• "Engineering a programmable split-ribozyme platform for detecting RNA in living cells," by Lauren Gambill.
• "Rational engineering of a modular CRISPRa platform with expanded target range," by Maria C. Villegas Kcam.
• "Towards dynamic and complex RNA circuits: A novel approach to address retroactivity with positive feedback insulation," by Baiyang Liu

And also proud to accept second and first place awards, respectively, for the following posters:

• "Activating silent biosynthetic gene clusters in Streptomyces spp. with CRISPRi tools," by Andrea Ameruoso
• "Variety is the splice of life: High-throughput topological engineering of splicing ribozymes for new switches and sensors," by August Staubus

The conference included a great keynote speech given by Rice's own, Dr. Caroline Ajo-Franklin, along with other fascinating talks on cutting-edge synthetic biology research. We hope to be back next year!

Cells can be programmed to sense infectious agents and, in response, actuate biomolecular programs to alert, protect the host, or destroy the pathogenic target. Engineering cells in this manner would provide a transformative approach to address the threat of emerging viral diseases. The Chappell lab hopes to contribute to these efforts. In a collaborative effort the Chappell and Segatori labs were awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to develop a novel RNA detection platform for programming cells. We are very excited to contribute to these efforts by NSF!

The ability of cells to reliably replicate and maintain genomic information is a key facet of life. Recapitulating these mechanisms is a critical step towards the development of autonomous synthetic cells that exhibit self-replication and stable propagation of their genetic information. The Chappell Lab hopes to address this. In a collaborative effort the Chappell, Lakin, Davenport, and Frow labs were awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to develop a synthetic DNA replication control system. We are very excited to contribute to the grand challenging of constructing a synthetic cell and understanding the rules of life !

A major challenge in understanding the risk of synthetic microbial technologies is the lack of simple tools for monitoring gene transfer from these microbes to environmental consortia. To address this, the Chappell, Silberg, Stadler, and Masiello labs at Rice university were awarded a Biotechnology Risk Assessment Research (BRAG) grant from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to develop a new framework for monitoring and predicting gene transfer from synthetic microbes to environmental microbial communities in soil. This project leverages several exciting synthetic biology innovations from our team, and builds upon the growing community at Rice working at the interface of synthetic biology and environmental science.

The Chappell lab welcomes Andrea Garza Elizondo and  August Staubus​ joining from the Biochemistry and Cell Biology (BCB) graduate program here in the BioScience department at Rice.

The Chappell lab was awarded a Welch Foundation research grant to support our work in creating new synthetic biology technologies for eliciting bacterial natural product synthesis. The Welch Foundation is the nation's largest funding source for basic chemical research and it is a great honor to be supported by them.  Read more about the Welch Foundation here and see 2019 list of awards here.

James and Baiyang teach at the 2019 Synthetic Biology Course at Cold Spring Harbor Labs. Great year at CSHL exploring new ideas with students and hearing awesome talks from researchers in the field. Fantastic group of students this year and an amazing speaker line up! More details about this years course can be found here (https://cshlsynbio.wordpress.com/). 

Milestone for the lab — our first paper. We are excited to publish our first Chappell lab paper in the special Synthetic Biology Edition of Current Opinion in Systems Biology. Our review covers exciting recent developments in the RNA synthetic biology field and some of our favorite papers from the last few years. Check out our paper "Brave new ‘RNA’ world—advances in RNA tools and their application for understanding and engineering biological systems".

James is selected as a 2018 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Computational and Evolutionary Molecular Biology. Awarded yearly since 1955, the fellowships is awards to 126  researchers in 8 fields in recognition of distinguished performance and a unique potential to make substantial contributions to their field.

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