188

Emerging Technology Competition

This is a Europe-wide competition for new technologies, in which our approach to DNA

storage using light-guided polymerases and exonucleases was also presented in the final in

2015 (Dandekar and Lopez 2015; see Dandekar et al. 2013). The Emerging Technology

Competition also pits a number of other fascinating new approaches against each other

each year.

This is a competition on synthetic biology to use new molecular circuits to trigger new

technically helpful developments. Harvard and MIT’s global competition is deliberately

aimed at students who want to advance molecular design and synthetic biology with

new ideas.

Emerging Technology Competition of the Royal Society

https://www.rsc.org/competitions/emerging-­technologies/

Active DNA Storage by Light-Controlled Proteins

https://register.dpma.de/DPMAregister/pat/PatSchrifteneinsicht?docId=

DE102013004584A1

Helpfully, Dandekar (2015, 2016) and Shityakov et al. (2019) describe all the

details and our current experiments on the nanocellulose chip for replication.

Analysis of the Function and Domains in the Protein

It is important not only to consider the function of the domains of the natural protein, but

also to look for suitable domains for the new functions that the protein is to have. For

example, a BLUF domain is used for control by light, and a kinase domain (for phosphory­

lation), a cofactor-binding domain or a DNA-binding domain (so that transcription can be

specifically activated) is used for other new enzyme properties.

The insertion of individual sequence sections can also be pretested in this way.

https://www.uniprot.org/

https://smart.embl-­heidelberg.de/

Synthetic Biology Competition

https://igem.org/Main_Page

13  Life Invents Ever New Levels of Language