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Applied Synthetic Biology in Europe combines science and engineering to design and construct artificial biological functions and systems not found in nature to solve specific scientific problems. It is increasingly relevant to the European Biotechnology industries: current challenges range from the design of new pharmaceuticals to environmental biotechnology, biofuels, novel biocatalysts and sustainable sources of food.

The BioBricks Foundation in the USA has pioneered the worldwide dissemination of information about developments in synthetic biology, especially those in the USA. There have also been many synthetic biology meetings in Germany, however despite the immense interest in this topic within our biotechnology community, the rest of Europe has been less organised in building comprehensive links between the biotechnology industrial sector and fundamental research. The European Federation of Biotechnology is keen to form a new group within the Microbial Physiology Section to promote advances in synthetic biology.

The meeting will focus on European research targeted to industrial needs. The emphasis will be on microbial and plant synthetic biology. The first meeting will emphasise experimental approaches to use synthetic biology to solve industrial problems: a future meeting might focus more on theoretical, modelling approaches to solve problems.

In order to optimise opportunities for European research centres to present their latest work, most of the talks will be 15 minutes long with 5 minutes for questions and discussion. There will be only a few invited talks, including keynote plenary lectures from European Laboratories. You are invited to propose contributions to fill the few remaining gaps in the scientific programme, or to present a poster of your work at the meeting.

Every effort has been made to minimise the cost of attending this meeting in the beautiful city of Barcelona. Preferentially low registration rates are available for academic participants and for employees of companies that are Institutional Members of the EFB. There will be grants of €200 to decrease the cost of participation for students, providing one senior member of the same group registers for the meeting at the normal fee. These grants will be limited to one individual per institution.