Category: Uncategorized

THE FUTURE IS PROGRAMMABLE CELLS. "Thirty years ago, the future lay in programming computers. Today, it’s programming cells. That was the message of panelists at “Programming Life: the revolutionary potential of synthetic biology.” https://lnkd.in/dTQVWrg View in LinkedIn

REDEFINING NATURE. "The potential of text, and of code that is currently built of text, is expanding in this era of the physical and the biological, where nature itself is being rethought and redefined." https://lnkd.in/dCVHq5S View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE continues and concludes from last weekend on the theme of viral quasispecies and mutant swarms. An astonishingly high mutation rate, that characterizes viral storms, comes at a cost to the virus, and generally this has been overlooked. This low fidelity reproduction requires the development of tolerance in the swarm, both of which have clinical ramifications. View in LinkedIn

THE END OF DARWINISM. "Gerald Joyce (Scripps Research Institute) frets that as the boundaries blur, biologists are now going to be directing evolution and that we are witnessing "the end of Darwinism." http://www.cfr.org/united-states/biologys-brave-new-world/p31894 View in LinkedIn

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

LOW FIDELITY. "The focus on mutation as a driving force in viral evolution has tended to overlook the tremendous cost of low replicative fidelity." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042682215001580 View in LinkedIn

DIAGNOSTIC SOLUTION. "To overcome this limitation an experimental approach was developed that dramatically reduces sequencing errors.The basic premise of this method, called Circular Sequencing (or CirSeq). Using this approach, we are now able to estimate changes in mutation frequency of variants that exist in the population at very low levels. This opens an opportunity to determine fitness landscape at single nucleotide resolution." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042682215001580 View in LinkedIn

DIAGNOSTIC CHALLENGES. "Characterizing the genetic structure of virus populations remains a fundamental challenge. High-throughput sequencing technologies are capable of generating very large datasets; but distinguishing true genetic variation from sequencing error remains a central problem due to the high average sequencing error rates for NGS and given that even small error probabilities result in a significant number of sequencing errors." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042682215001580 View in LinkedIn

PROGNOSTIC FITNESS. "Translated into clinical practice, it means that the evolutionary history of HCV in infected patients may influence the response to treatments. In particular, long-term replication of HCV during prolonged chronicity may increase viral fitness to the detriment of treatment efficacy, as observed in clinical practice. These observations render essential to develop methods to define fitness values in vivo and to explore the fitness landscape in viral populations." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042682215001580 View in LinkedIn