Designing Biology I

Last Friday I went to a free one day conference at Harvard University called
Designing Biology. There were five presentations covering various areas of covered research. While the conference was meant for laymen, I still found I had to try hard to keep up in a field I wasn't familar with.

The first presentation was by Nobel Prize winner Linda Buck on the sense of smell. I think this was the first time I was in the same room as a Nobel Prize winner, pretty cool stuff. She began by saying she studied "perception" which struck me as sounding very general, but in this case, it's quite apt for studying one of the five senses. It turns out mammals can detect odors and pheromones and they use two different mechanisms to do so. The difference is that pheromones are hard-wired to a specific physiological response. Also it seems while other animals can detect pheromones there is no proof that humans can. As mice detect smell there are three layers of sensors involved, Odor Receptors (OR) in the nose transmit signals to the Olfactory Bulb (OB), an intermediary mass of nerves, and then to the Olfactory Cortex (OC) in the brain. A combinatorical method is used by the nerves, so an odor may trigger many OR sensors, which trigger a few OBs and and then many OCs. It was amazing to hear that to test these hypothesis they used transgenic mice built to track specific oders through the system and then checked brain slices, as if this was an ordinary thing.

The next presentation was by Drew Endy and was about applying engineering princples such as standarization and abstraction to genetics. He talked about his work with Bacteriophage T7 and how in 10 years they've only figured out what half the base pair sequences do. There seems to be some overlap in the genes so they tried modifying the gene sequence, duplicating some of the genes to avoid the overlap. This is analogous to writting slow software that's easier to understand as opposed to highly optimized but difficult to maintain code. He then talked about thinking of gene sequences as parts, which can be assembled into devices and then into systems, just like engineering parts. If you could find a sequence that was an inverter, you could combine them to make an oscillator. And what if you posted them on a website for others to find and use in new and novel ways. Amazing as it sounds, this parts site exists today. The he described a project in which undergraduate students built an organism that, I guess the word is lived, a particular Game of Life, see slide 36 of his talk. Then he showed an image of fluorescing bacteria that acted as a display showing the words "Hello World". Just astounding.

More later.