Interfacing systems biology and synthetic biology

A report of BioSysBio 2009, the IET conference on Synthetic Biology, Systems Biology and Bioinformatics, Cambridge, UK, 23-25 March 2009.

The fourth meeting in the BioSysBio conference series brought together international researchers in the interacting disciplines of synthetic biology, systems biology and bioinformatics. This conference was largely student-run, and as well as the formal talks included workshops, discussion sessions and a panel session on ethics, public engagement and biosecurity. A wide range of topics was covered at the conference, including modeling, biofuels and environmental bioremediation, metabolomics, structural and computational genomics, and software tools. Of note were the number of groups presenting improved models of metabolism, studying cellular subsystems such as cell death and circadian rhythms. Others are developing new approaches and standards for systems and synthetic biology, and significant improvements were reported for Systems Biology Markup Language (SBML) and the MIT Registry of Standard Biological Parts. A few highlights of the meeting are given here.