Making biology more like computer systems

Synthetic biology extends the spirit of genetic engineering to focus on whole systems of genes and gene products. The focus on systems as opposed to individual genes or pathways is shared by the contemporaneous discipline of systems biology, which analyzes biological organisms in their entirety. The goal of synthetic biology is to extend or modify …

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synthetic biology: Programmable Cells: Engineer Turns Bacteria Into Living Computers

04/27/05 — In a step toward making living cells function as if they were tiny computers, engineers at Princeton have programmed bacteria to communicate with each other and produce color-coded patterns. The feat, accomplished in a biology lab within the Department of Electrical Engineering, represents an important proof-of-principle in an emerging field known as “synthetic …

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DNA/RNA nanotechnology: Survey of synthetic biology

Synthetic biology wiki defines Synthetic Biology isA) the design and construction of new biological parts, devices, and systems, andB) the re-design of existing, natural biological systems for useful purposes. are currently working to * help specify and populate a set of standard parts that have well-defined performance characteristics and can be used (and re-used) to …

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Nanocrystal displays: Quantum dots to make vibrant, flexible screens.

The best potential advantage of quantum dot LEDs (QD-LEDs) is that they use much less power than LCDs. In LCDs, a backlight illuminates every pixel on the screen. Dark pixels are simply blocking this light, in effect wasting energy. In part because quantum dots emit light rather than filtering it, a QD-LED display could potentially …

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Advancing nanoscale self-assembly: placing and anchoring many molecules capable of mechanical work onto a surface

Researchers from the University of Bologna, Italy, University of Birmingham, UK, Paul Sabatier University in France and University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), US, have come up with a technique for arranging molecular machines on a solid surface. The team used a cospreading strategy to create layers of chemically switchable rotaxane molecules on indium tin …

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Other tech: Slightly modified Cell processors 20 times better than AMD Opterons and Intel Itanium2 chips for supercomputers

computer scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory evaluated the processor’s performance in running several scientific application kernels, then compared this performance against other processor architectures. The paper, “The Potential of the Cell Processor for Scientific Computing,” was written by Samuel Williams, Leonid Oliker, Parry Husbands, Shoaib Kamil and Katherine Yelick, …

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