Team:Czech Republic/Practices/Lecture
Lecture
Contents
Motivation
Since a lot of ideas behind IODs were built on the fundamentals of classical engineering, we wanted to introduce the concept of our project (from an engineering point-of-view) to young engineers and receive their feedback. We presented our project and synthetic biology in general at a lecture of the Introduction to Cybernetics class 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 some of the students even showed deeper interest in synthetic biology and individually contacted us later.
Lecture
In most if not all engineering disciplines, engineers design complex systems by combining simpler components. This is the idea of modularity, an idea so potent one could hardly come up example of a functioning system that doesn't use modularity. Why is this idea so fruitful?. Modularity offers easiness of design and simple modificiation of an already working system. For example, a sensor can be easily replaced by a different sensor to measure different quantity. Same procedure can be done with every other type of component. Diploid IODs form from two haploids. Thus, their user can conduct countless combinations of sensors (receptors), transmitters (pheromones), and locational tags (yeast display). Furthermore, the design of IODS offers another level of modularity in communication between different IOD types.
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