• An open-doors round table about synthetic biology and artificial life will take place on Tuesday the 30th October in the Capella de la Sapiència (La Nau, Valencia)

• This debate will be celebrated in the framework of an international meeting that will gather experts in synthetic biology

Synthetic Biology (SynBio) focuses on the design and engineering of biological systems with the goal of knowing them better and obtaining benefits from them. Standards are one of the main pillars of modern engineering, and although these are currently well defined in the industrial and engineering fields, they are not so well defined in other fields such as biology. In fact, there is a great need of defining the characteristics of standards in biological systems. With the aim of gathering all the work and advances in SynBio up to date and of creating a European and international network of experts in this field, the European Project BioRoboost recently kicked-off. This project receives funding from the European Union Horizon 2020 Research & Innovation Programme and is led by the University of Valencia. BioRoboost intends to gather all the advances in standardization in biology, and to offer all this information to both specialized and general audiences through social networks (Twitter @BioRoboost; Facebook @bioroboost), videos on YouTube and online debates, among others.

This European Project will celebrate its kick-off meeting on the 30^th and 31^st of October in CSIC’s Casa de la Ciencia in Valencia, and is expecting an assistance of over 50 international SynBio experts. An open-doors round table will take place on Tuesday the 30^th of October at 6 pm in the Capella de la Sapiència of the cultural center La Nau of the University of Valencia. The aim of this round table is to disseminate the principles and applications of SynBio, as well as to offer the possibility of answering any questions that the audience may have regarding SynBio. Specifically, the round table will focus on the relation between SynBio and artificial life, including both practical and ethical aspects. The round-table will be formed by: Luis Serrano and María Lluch, of the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), Víctor de Lorenzo, of the National Centre for Biotechnology (CNB-CSIC, Madrid), Cristina Vilanova of the company Darwin Bioprospecting Excellence S.L., and Ana Delgado, from the University of Oslo. The moderator of the discussion will be Manuel Porcar, leader the Biotechnology and SynBio group of the Institute for Integrative Systems Biology (I²SysBio, UV-CSIC) and leader of the BioRoboost project.