Synthetic biology and microdevices : a powerful combination

Recent developments demonstrate that the combination of microbiology with micro-and nanoelectronics is a successful approach to develop new miniaturized sensing devices and other technologies. In the last decade, there has been a shift from the optimization of the abiotic components, for example, the chip, to the improvement of the processing capabilities of cells through genetic engineering. The synthetic biology approach will not only give rise to systems with new functionalities, but will also improve the robustness and speed of their response towards applied signals. To this end, the development of new genetic circuits has to be guided by computational design methods that enable to tune and optimize the circuit response. As the successful design of genetic circuits is highly dependent on the quality and reliability of its composing elements, intense characterization of standard biological parts will be crucial for an efficient rational design process in the development of new genetic circuits. Microengineered devices can thereby offer a new analytical approach for the study of complex biological parts and systems. By summarizing the recent techniques in creating new synthetic circuits and in integrating biology with microdevices, this review aims at emphasizing the power of combining synthetic biology with microfluidics and microelectronics

Farm enterprises as self-organizing systems: A new transdisciplinary framework for studying farm enterprises?

The growing attention to sustainable food production and multifunctional agriculture calls for a multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary research and development perspective on farming, which is able to grasp the environmental, social, technical, and financial aspects of a farm and the dynamic relationship between the farm enterprises and the surrounding world. Our thesis is that a transdisciplinary approach needs to build on a working ontology that goes beyond the epistemology of each discipline and that is not just pieced together of the ontologies connected to these different epistemologies. Based on a review of three prevailing theoretical frameworks within the field of agro-sociology: The farming styles approach, the Bawden approach, and Conway’s agroecosystem approach, we argue that these existing theories do not offer such a theoretical framework. The claim of this paper is that a new concept of a farm enterprise as a self-organizing social system, which combines ideas from Actor-Network theory (ANT) and Luhmann’s theory of social systems, can serve as a useful ontological platform for understanding a farm-enterprise as an entity independent of a scientific observer. In this framework, each farm is understood as a self-organizing node in a complex of heterogeneous socio-technical networks of food, supply, knowledge, technology, etc. This implies that a farm has to be understood as the way in which these network relationships are organised by the farm as a self-organizing social system. Among all the different possible ways in which to interact with the surrounding world, the system has to select a coherent strategy in order to make the farming processes possible at all. It will be discussed how this framework may add to the understanding of the continuous development of a heterogeneity of farm strategies and contribute to a more comprehensive view of the fields of regulation and extension