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-minute lecture on synthetic biology, we introduced our project. The response was surprisingly positive. Not only we were asked several to-the-point questions, but some of the students also showed a deeper interest in synthetic biology and individually contacted us after the talk.
Lecture
Engineers design systems composed of simple components to ensure modularity. The modularity of a system is a huge advantage for its use. A sensor of an input signal can be replaced and the system will measure a completely different quantity. The same interchanging procedure can be done with almost every component. Diploid IODs emerge from two haploids. Thus, their user can make many different combinations of sensors (receptors) and output signals (pheromones or yeast display). Another level of modularity is ensured by the communication between all IODs.
One of the primary goals of cybernetics is to describe a system, control it, and be able to know the response of this system to a particular input signal. This response may be in the form of an output signal that can be measured and may influence another system. IODs are an excellent example of such modular system. A pheromone represents the input signal, and the output signals are yeast display surface receptors and a different set of pheromones, which are also the input signal for an another IOD part.
Engineers often use graphical block diagramming tools to make the functionality of a system transparent. Block models considerably simplify the description of a system. Therefore, it is not necessary to describe a system with difficult differential equations and recurrence relations. We used these diagrams for a graphical representation of our IODs. This approach made our project clearer to the engineers non-biologists.
Acknowledgement
Prof. Ing. Miloš Schlegel CSc