Researchers have made great progress in recent years in the design and creation of biological circuits — systems that, like electronic circuits, can take a number of different inputs and deliver a particular kind of output. But while individual components of such biological circuits can have precise and predictable responses, those outcomes become less predictable as more such elements are combined.
A team of researchers at MIT has now come up with a way of greatly reducing that unpredictability, introducing a device that could ultimately allow such circuits to behave nearly as predictably as their electronic counterparts. The findings are published this week in the journal Nature Biotechnology, in a paper by associate professor of mechanical engineering Domitilla Del Vecchio and professor of biological engineering Ron Weiss.
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Tuesday November 25 2014, @09:28AM
Sweet. Just call me "Locutus".
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2) by CoolHand on Tuesday November 25 2014, @04:07PM
I was thinking more Babylon5 or Farscape tech myself...
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(Score: 2, Informative) by Gravis on Tuesday November 25 2014, @10:21AM
Information flow is driven by the chemical interactions of the individual components, which ideally should affect only other specific components. But in practice, attempts to create such biological linkages have often produced results that differed from expectations.
“If you put the circuit together and you expect answer ‘X,’ and instead you get answer ‘Y,’ that could be highly problematical,” Del Vecchio says.
The device the team produced to address that problem is called a load driver, and its effect is similar to that of load drivers used in electronic circuits: It provides a kind of buffer between the signal and the output, preventing the effects of the signaling from backing up through the system and causing delays in outputs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 26 2014, @03:26AM
...its effect is similar to that of load drivers used in electronic circuits...
This sounds like a good use of "impedance match/mismatch", unlike the bogus one quoted in the article on Google "Inbox" involving translation from one language to another.
(Score: 2) by mtrycz on Wednesday November 26 2014, @03:00PM
The big problem with this kind of thing, while cool and all, is that the biological interactions are a whole different kind of medium than electronic circuits. You won't have success in reproducing electronic circuits in biologic ones. It's incredibly difficult to "program" a XOR gate, yet the biological systems (not circuits) drive organisms of unfathomable complexity.
You'd need a *different* kind of problem to solve, to use a biological circuit. The question is that nobody know what problem is it.
I'd place my bet on simpe massively parallel circuits and probabilistic computing, but that's just me.
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