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The EMBO-EMBL Symposium 'Synthetic Morphogenesis: From Gene Circuits to Tissue Architecture' was held in Heidelberg, Germany, in March 2019, with 150 participants seeking to reverseengineer embryogenesis, emphasizing quantitative simulation and the use of synthetic systems to test models. This highly dynamic, interdisciplinary mix of quantitative developmental genetics, bioengineering, synthetic biology and artificial life aimed to reveal how evolution exploits physical forces and genetics to implement the cell- and tissue-level decision-making required for complex morphogenesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Demand response has been noted as a major element of future smart energy systems. However, there is still a lack of knowledge about the demand response actions in different conditions—including climate, dynamic energy price, and building types. This study examines energy and cost saving potential of the rule-based demand response in district heating network, in three different building types, in Germany and Finland. The studied building types are apartment buildings, cultural centers, and office buildings. The real-time pricing-based demand response is applied to space heating under the climate conditions of Helsinki, Finland and Hamburg, Germany. Moreover, the typical synthetic dynamic price data, which are based on both counties' district heating production structure, is applied separately for each countries' cases. Simulations of this study are conducted with validated simulation tool IDA ICE. The results present that the demand response can provide energy and cost savings around 0.5–7.7% and 0.7–8.1% respectively, depending on the building type and country. The results indicate that marginal value of the control signal, climate conditions, and the dynamic price of the district heating have effect on the demand response saving potential. Flatter district heating price profile provides less savings than a more fluctuating profile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a report on outcomes of the 10th Computational Modeling in Biology Network (COMBINE) meeting that was held in Heidelberg, Germany, in July of 2019. The annual event brings together researchers, biocurators and software engineers to present recent results and discuss future work in the area of standards for systems and synthetic biology. The COMBINE initiative coordinates the development of various community standards and formats for computational models in the life sciences. Over the past 10 years, COMBINE has brought together standard communities that have further developed and harmonized their standards for better interoperability of models and data. COMBINE 2019 was co-located with a stakeholder workshop of the European EU-STANDS4PM initiative that aims at harmonized data and model standardization for in silico models in the field of personalized medicine, as well as with the FAIRDOM PALs meeting to discuss findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) data sharing. This report briefly describes the work discussed in invited and contributed talks as well as during breakout sessions. It also highlights recent advancements in data, model, and annotation standardization efforts. Finally, this report concludes with some challenges and opportunities that this community will face during the next 10 years.

Synthetic biology (SynBio) represents a relatively young field of research which has developed into an important scientific endeavour. Characterised by a high degree of interdisciplinary work crossing disciplinary boundaries, such as biology, mathematics and engineering, SynBio has been, since its beginning, devoted to creating new biological functions, metabolic pathways or even minimal organisms. Although its often-articulated aim of developing new forms of life has so far not been archived, SynBio nowadays represents a well-established biotechnological approach and it has also attracted public concern, especially since Craig Venter's work on Mycoplasma Mycoides JCVI-syn1.0. Taking these developments as a starting point, the paper empirically investigates the metaphorical representations of SynBio in two leading German media publications, the daily newspaper Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the weekly magazine Der Spiegel between 2000 and 2010. Using a novel combination of metaphor and co-occurrence analysis, the paper engages in a systematic examination of implicit moral implications inherent in linguistic images permeating this news coverage. It demonstrates a method of how media-metaphorical representations and their moral implications of SynBio could analytically be revealed and analysed. In doing so, it aims at contributing to empirical ethical analyses of the news coverage on SynBio in particular and offers an approach that methodologically adds to literature on responsible language use, which is emerging in science and technology studies and ethical analyses of new technologies.