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ELECTRICAL LEGO. "By assembling genetic components into “circuits” that perform logical operations in living cells, synthetic biologists aim to artificially empower cells to solve critical problems in medicine, energy and the environment."" " http://lnkd.in/dW8rn6z View in LinkedIn

DESIGNER LIFE. "A major objective of synthetic biology is to make the process of designing genetically encoded biological systems more systematic, predictable, robust, scalable, and efficient. Examples of genetic systems in the field vary widely in terms of operating hosts, compositional approaches, and network complexity, ranging from simple genetic switches to search-and-destroy systems." " " http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-chembioeng-061312-103351?journalCode=chembioeng View in LinkedIn

BIOLOGY AS PROGRAMMABLE CIRCUITS. "Researchers increasingly envision an important role for artificial biochemical circuits in biological engineering, much like electrical circuits in electrical engineering. Similar to electrical circuits, which control electromechanical devices, biochemical circuits could be utilized as a type of servomechanism to control nanodevices in vitro, monitor chemical reactions in situ, or regulate gene expressions in vivo."" " http://lnkd.in/d-Ep29M View in LinkedIn

FRESH PERSPECTIVE ON COMPLEXITY: simplify it. "Synthetic biological circuits are an application of synthetic biology where biological parts inside a cell are designed to perform logical functions mimicking those observed in electronic networks. The goal of synthetic biology is to generate an array of tunable and characterized parts, or modules, with which any desirable synthetic biological circuit can be easily designed and implemented."" " http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_biological_circuit View in LinkedIn

DNA IS A FOSSIL RECORD, littered with old copies of code from parasitic DNA (transposable elements), some over 900 million years old, making up to 80% of a genome of some species. Some of these randomly incorporated bits of parasitic DNA still have functionality in the modern host. " " http://lnkd.in/dEuD5fG View in LinkedIn

THE SOURCE CODE. "The language of DNA is digital but not binary. Encoding has 0 and 1 to work with (hence the 'bi'nary). DNA has 4 positions T, C, G and A; whereas a digital byte is mostly 8 binary digits, a DNA 'byte' (called a codon) has 3 digits. Because each digit can have 4 values instead of 2, a DNA codon has 64 possible values, compared to a binary byte which has 256. A typical DNA codon is 'GCC' which codes the amino acid alanine." Together these string together to make proteins, and all living things." " http://lnkd.in/dghBZfW View in LinkedIn

AGRIBUSINESS has produced unprecedented cheap food in recent years. Just a generation ago, chicken was a luxury for most households, and salmon was a luxury for the rich. Today both are a cheap commodities. To make cheap food, industrial factory methods have been applied to agriculture. Now we are re-examining the costs of cheap food for our society and the world. View in LinkedIn

DNA AS INFO OR MEASURED BY ENTROPY. "The information content for coding regions is 0.4 bit per triplet and for non-coding regions 0.18 bit per triplet. For 3 billion base pairs, or 1 billion triplets, this gives us an actual information content of 0.4 billion bits or 50 Mbytes assuming the best case scenario that all DNA is coding or about 24 Mbytes if all the DNA is non-coding."" " http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2008/10/information-con.html View in LinkedIn

WAS MALTHUS RIGHT? "Malthus became widely known for his theories about change in population. His 'An Essay on the Principle of Population' observed that sooner or later population will be checked by famine and disease, leading to what is known as a Malthusian catastrophe. He wrote in opposition to the popular view in 18th-century Europe that saw society as improving and in principle as perfectible."" " http://lnkd.in/dhvgETh View in LinkedIn

GIANT BIOINFORMATICS DATABASES. "Today, computer programs such as BLAST are used daily to search sequences from more than 260,000 organisms, containing over 190 billion nucleotides."" " http://lnkd.in/dGYyHkT View in LinkedIn