Biological computer created at Stanford

[theworldismine13]

Biological computer created at Stanford - San Jose Mercury News

In the foreseeable future, humans might carry microscopic natural computers inside their cells that could guard against disease and warn of toxic threats based on a Stanford research achievement.

A team of engineers there has invented genetic transistors, completing a simple computer within living cells, a major step forward in the emerging field of synthetic biology.

The startling achievement, to be unveiled in Friday's issue of the journal Science, presages the day when "living computers" inside the human body could screen for cancer, detect toxic chemicals or even turn cell reproduction on and off.

"We're going to be able to put computers inside any living cell you want," said lead researcher Drew Endy of Stanford's School of Engineering.

"We're not going to replace the silicon computers. We're not going to replace your phone or your laptop," he said. "But we're going to get computing working in places where silicon would never work.

"Any place you want a little bit of logic, a little bit of computation, a little bit of memory -- we're going to be able to do that," said Endy.

Conceptually, it's like electronics, where a transistor controls the flow of electrons along a circuit.

But biology is the basis for what the team calls a "transcriptor," which controls the flow of an important protein as it travels along a strand of DNA.

Transcriptors are a biological version of electrical engineers' "logic gates"
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-- the building blocks of digital circuits that send and receive signals.

The gates could derive true-false answers to virtually any biological question that might be posed within a cell. For instance: Is toxic mercury present? It could detect it.

Also: They can count. This would be a useful tool when treating diseases like cancer, where cells divide uncontrollably. Suppose a liver cell carries a counter that records how many times it divides. Once the counter hits 500, for instance, the cell could be programmed to die.

Endy's work "clearly demonstrates the power of synthetic biology and could revolutionize how we compute in the future," said UC Berkeley biochemical engineer Jay Keasling. He is director of the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center that helped support research at Stanford.

Endy, recruited to Stanford from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a builder -- a civil engineer who started with boyhood Erector Sets and Legos, later working on bridge repair projects for Amtrak.

Now he's building with the stuff of life to use it as a technology platform.

"Biology is not just a science of discovery, but also a technology for making things," he said.

He cofounded the BioBricks Foundation supporting free-to-use standards and technologies for engineering biology. The team's transcriptor-based gates do not alone constitute a computer. But they are the third and final component of a 10-year drive.

Last year, the team delivered the other two core components of a computer.

The first was a type of rewritable digital data storage within DNA. Information can be stored inside cells by flipping DNA sequences back and forth between two possible orientations to represent and store "0'' and "1'' that represent one "bit" of computer data.

The other was a mechanism for transmitting genetic data from cell to cell, a biological Internet.

The creation of "logic gates" means that everything can be connected, and signals can work. Researchers who learned of the work ahead of publication are already using the gates to reprogram metabolism, according to Endy.

Getting the computer's data to output might involve engineering cells to change noticeably.

The "simplest way is to have the cells change their smell or color," Endy said. Students at Cambridge University and the Royal College of Art developed a "scat-o-log" by engineering E. coli bacteria to produce a full spectrum of pigments (like a box of crayola crayons), he said.

These new biological computers will be slow, working on millihertz -- not gigahertz -- frequencies, Endy cautioned.

"But they'll work in places where we don't have computing now," he said.

 

[The Real]

Biological computer created at Stanford - San Jose Mercury News

Fascinating research. I think this stuff is as much the future as "cybernetics" and technological augmentation.

 

[Julius Skrrvin]

You ever heard of these breh?

Protein-coated disc - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

our eventual future is on some

shyt

 

[Sensitive Blake Griffin]

thank you based science

 

[Meta Reign]

Super demonic.

 

[Field Marshall Bradley]

Biological computer created at Stanford - San Jose Mercury News

I'm gonna need a list of the companies that has this technology patented

 

[See El Bee Free]

Nanomachines, SON!

 

[Mowgli]

Yea and what happens when your nano machines and basically your life are under the control of a company that can turn you off, remotely.

 

[Brown_Pride]

Yea and what happens when your nano machines and basically your life are under the control of a company that can turn you off, remotely.

because you missed a nanobot payment.

 

[Mowgli]

because you missed a nanobot payment.

*we dont like to call it murder we call it, rescinding benefits.*

 

[Brown_Pride]

*we dont like to call it murder we call it, rescinding benefits.*

at Sony bots fighting Microsoft bots fighting Norton Anti-Bot bots all inside of you.


I wonder what the long term implications on our immune systems would be.

Beneficial mutation is pivotal to evolution is it not? I mean even "bad" mutations, paired with other random mutations might hold the genetic code to ultimately turn into GOOD mutations no?

 

[Mowgli]

at Sony bots fighting Microsoft bots fighting Norton Anti-Bot bots all inside of you.


I wonder what the long term implications on our immune systems would be.

Beneficial mutation is pivotal to evolution is it not? I mean even "bad" mutations, paired with other random mutations might hold the genetic code to ultimately turn into GOOD mutations no?

You sign up for some nanobots than some better ones come out and you have to go through some kind of dangerous procedure to remove the old nanobots because of potential life threatening health complications if the two share the same body.

I guess theyll be new mutations to adapt to what we're doing to ourselves. We'll have to find out how deep the human body actually gets. Ill just let my life expire naturally.