Team:Czech Republic/Practices/Lecture
Lecture
Contents
Motivation
Since a lot of ideas behind IODs were build on the fundamentals of classical engineering, we wanted to present the concept of our project (from an engineering point-of-view) to young engineers and get their feedback. We had a great opportunity to present our project and synthetic biology in general at a lecture of Introduction into Cybernetics led by Prof. Ing. Miloš Schlegel CSc. After giving a 30 min lecture about synthetic biology, we introduced our project. The response was surprisingly positive. Not only were we asked several to-the-point questions, but several students even showed deeper interest in synthetic biology and individually contacted us later.
Lecture
Engineers design systems composed of simple components in order to ensure modularity. Modularity of system is huge advantage for its use. Sensor of input signal can be replaced to measure different quantity. Same procedure can be done with almost every component. Diploid IODs arise of two haploids. Thus, their user can conduct many different combinations of sensors (receptors) and output signals (pheromones or yeast display). Another modularity is ensured by communication among all IODs.
One of the main goal of cybernetic is to describe system, control it and be able to know reaction of this system on a concrete input signal. This reaction may be in form of output signal that can be measured and can influence another system. IODs are excellent example of such system. Pheromone represents input signal and output signals are yeast display and another pheromone which is an input signal for another IOD system.
Engineers often use graphical block diagramming tools to make functionality of system transparent. Block models simplify work on system description. It is not necessary to describe a system with difficult differential equations and recurrence relations. We used these diagrams for graphical representation of IODs. This approach made our project more clear to engineers non-biologists.
Acknowledgement
Prof. Ing. Miloš Schlegel CSc