•On Tuesday, October 30 at 6 p.m., a public round table on synthetic biology and artificial life will be held in the Capella de la Sapiència of La Nau

•This debate is being held within the framework of an international meeting of experts in synthetic biology

Synthetic biology seeks the design and engineering of biological systems to understand them better and obtain benefits from them. One of the pillars of modern engineering are standards, which are currently very well defined in the industrial and engineering field, although not so well defined in other disciplines such as biology. In fact, there is a great need to define the characteristics that standards in biological systems must meet. In order to unite all the efforts and advances in synthetic biology and to create a European and international network of experts in this discipline, the European BioRoboost Project has recently been launched, funded by the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Framework Program of the European Union and led by the University of Valencia. This project aims to bring together all the advances to date in standardization in biology and make all the knowledge available to both specialists and the general public through of publications on social networks (Twitter @BioRoboost; Facebook @bioroboost), videos on YouTube and online debates, among others.

This European project will hold its inaugural meeting on October 30 and 31 at the CSIC House of Science in Valencia, and more than 50 international experts in synthetic biology are expected to attend. On Tuesday, October 30 at 6 p.m., a public debate will be held in the Capella de la Sapiència of the La Nau cultural center of the University of Valencia. This round table aims to disseminate among citizens the principles and applications of synthetic biology, genome editing or bioengineering, as well as offer the possibility of resolving any questions related to synthetic biology with experts in this discipline. Specifically, the topic that will be discussed in the debate will be the relationship between synthetic biology and artificial life, including both practical and ethical aspects. Participating in the debate will be: Luis Serrano and María Lluch, from the Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG, Barcelona), Víctor de Lorenzo, from the National Center for Biotechnology (CNB-CSIC, Madrid), Cristina Vilanova from the company Darwin Bioprospecting Excellence S.L., and Ana Delgado from the University of Oslo. The moderator of the debate will be Manuel Porcar, who leads the Biotechnology and Synthetic Biology group at the Institute of Integrative Systems Biology (I²SysBio, UV-CSIC) and coordinates the BioRoboost project.