Reading List

Some suggested reading for students on the Systems and Synthetic Biology programme.

We often get requests for reading lists that can be read in preparation for your studies. As a postgraduate programme, we teach little from textbooks, but instead mostly recommend papers to read. 

Here are a few references you can look at to help prepare you for the upcoming session. This is not an exhaustive list and you can read further from these if you have the time.

  • Lazebnik Y. Can a biologist fix a radio? Cancer Cell 2002; 2: 179.
  • Hartwell LH, Hopfield JJ, Leibler S, Murray AW. From molecular to modular cell biology. Nature 1999; 402: C47.  
  • Cameron DE, Bashor CJ, Collins JJ. A brief history of synthetic biology. Nat Rev Microbiol. 2014; 12: 381.
  • Chen, Zibo, and Michael B. Elowitz. Programmable protein circuit design. Cell 2021; 184; 2284.

Finally, I strongly recommend that your knowledge of molecular and cellular biology is at the level of

  • Essential Cell Biology by Alberts et al. (Norton, 2019)

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