links for 2009-07-24

Wicked cool. "One of Ginkgo’s favorite biological engineers – Jeff Tabor, has just published his latest engineered biological system, a bacterial edge detector, in Cell Magazine."

"Those cells are derived from ordinary skin cells, and when they were created two years ago from human skin and genetically reprogrammed, it was hailed as a breakthrough. But questions remained whether they could act as chameleon-like as embryonic stem cells and morph into any cell type in the body."