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DNA AS SOFTWARE. "To do with biology what you would do if you were designing a piece of software." The immense change in our collective view of the natural world, and in such a brief time, is encapsulated in this remarkable sentence. http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2013/03/26/making-living-matter-programmable/ View in LinkedIn

SIMPLIFYING PROGRAMING OF E. COLI. "Currently, each time we need a cell that will perform a certain new function we have to recreate it from scratch which is a long and laborious process. Most people think all we have to do to modify behaviour is to modify a cell’s DNA but it’s not as simple as that — we usually find we get the wrong behaviour and then we are back to square one." (2011). http://www.tgdaily.com/trendwatch-features/59511-re-programmable-cells-to-create-new-life-forms View in LinkedIn

PROGRAMMING LIFE. "In five years time, we will be programming bacterial cells in the computer and compiling and storing its program into these new cells so they can readily execute them.” https://lnkd.in/dSKGWDR View in LinkedIn

SYNTHETIC BUGS. "All the key barriers to the artificial synthesis of viruses and bacteria have been overcome. Einstein's revolutionary theories helped unravel the secrets of the cosmos. They also led to the atom bomb." http://www.cfr.org/united-states/biologys-brave-new-world/p31894 View in LinkedIn

REWRITING LIFE. "But the implications of being able to engineer cells go deeper, according to Enriquez. “This isn’t just about economic growth, this is also about where we are going as a human species,” he said. Humans will no longer merely adapt to or adopt the environment, but “begin to understand how life is written, how life is coded, how life is copied, and how you can rewrite life.” http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2013/03/26/making-living-matter-programmable/ View in LinkedIn

MANIPULATION OF LIFE. "Juan Enriquez, a self-described “curiosity expert” and co-founder of the company Synthetic Genomics, compared the digital revolution spawned by thinking of information as a string of ones and zeros to the coming synthetic biology revolution, premised on thinking about life as a mix of interchangeable parts – genes and gene networks – that can be learned and manipulated like any language." http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2013/03/26/making-living-matter-programmable/ View in LinkedIn

RESISTANCE PHENOTYPES. “In the studies with HCV it was important to exclude that inhibitor resistance mutations had not been acquired as a consequence of fitness gain. This possibility was excluded not only by NGS but also by the multiplicity of infection (MOI)-independent kinetics of virus production in the presence of inhibitors, and the maintenance of the resistance phenotype in biological clones of the passaged populations." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042682215001580 View in LinkedIn

DRUG RESISTANCE. "One of the conclusions of these studies is that replicative fitness can be an independent predictor of the response of HCV to inhibitors used in therapy. It is known that viruses never exposed to inhibitors can nevertheless include in their mutant spectra mutations that confer resistance to the inhibitors." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042682215001580 View in LinkedIn

"FITNESS, defined as the overall capacity of a virus to produce infectious progeny has long been recognized as a critical parameter that reflects virus adaptation to a specific environment. Unperturbed replication of large viral populations in a constant environment results in fitness gain, adaptation, while repeated bottlenecks that result in accumulation of mutations result in fitness decrease, de-adaptation." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042682215001580 View in LinkedIn

UNIT OF SELECTION. "The evidence just summarized is consistent with the idea that viral quasispecies can act as a unit of selection, group selection, one of the features of complex systems in the sense that the properties of the “whole” cannot be directly inferred from the properties of the “individuals”. Viral quasispecies have approached virology to the growing field of biological complexity." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042682215001580 View in LinkedIn