CHE.496/2008/Responses/a9

CHE.496: Biological Systems Design Seminar

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Biological machines

Designing Biological Systems
- This powerpoint presentation by Pamela Silver of Harvard medical school discusses systems biology, which is different from the definition used in Che 496 thus far. In the powerpoint, she discusses the idea of standardizing biology and making it modular. The powerpoint goes on to say that systems biology can try to understand organisms, things we don't know, and why things work a certain way. She then goes on to discuss inelegant design, and points out the example of the vestigial thumb.

Biology by design: reduction and synthesis of cellular components and behaviour.
- I was unable to load this document unto my computer. From the abstract, this article discusses the emergence of synthetic biology from the question, "how can I apply that knowledge to generate novel functions in different biological systems or in other contexts?" This is very prevalent in the iGEM participants, who use genetic parts from many organisms, standardize them, and combine them to create novel functions. While I was unable to download this document, I feel that the question it poses in the beginning is very relevant to the study of synthetic biology.
KPHershey 00:46, 20 February 2008 (EST)

Designing Biological Systems
- the power point was rather broad and i couldn't really get that much from it. We probably need to discuss the points she brings up about how evolutionary change is not planned out and does not necessarily run like a wheel oiled machine while human design we can skip intermediate steps? ya, I didn't really understand that statement. I do agree though that systems biology needs to understand the why and the how before necessarily trying to implement what we've got because without a good background its much harder to create anything useful. its almost like a short term solution versus spending the extra time on fundamentals so that in the long run we are much further on with what systems biolgy is capable of doing.