Show Notes
Dr. Ilenne Del Valle and Emm Fulk introduce the topic of synthetic biology in this episode. I start by asking, "What is synthetic biology?" We then begin digging into some of the intricacies of synthetic biology by learning about biosensors; biosensors are a fundamental component of synthetic biology for translating environmental inputs and outputs. We next talk about all the different molecules that biosensors can sense that we could use for various applications.
Our conversation continues with introductions to many additional aspects of synthetic biology. We introduce and discuss synthetic biology circuit diagrams, which is another interesting area where the computational sciences and biological sciences converge. We next introduce CRISPR-based biosensors, synbio AND gates, and other logical operations that can used in the synthetic biology world. Finally, we discuss reporters. We introduce and cover several types of reporters and how they can help indicate which inputs are present. We end with a discussion of how synthetic biology components can be tuned to work even better, and the role bioinformatics can play in the world of synthetic biology.
This episode covers the review that both guests cowrote, that can be found here for further reading: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2020.618373/full
More from The Bioinformatics and Beyond Podcast
Dr. Justin Siegel begins this episode by explaining what enzymes are, how they have evolved, and why Dr. Siegel is motivated to try to engineer enzymes to perform functions tailored to help humanity instead of to perform functions based on how they evolved in nature. He explains the primary goal of the work discussed and relating enzyme sequence to function. Dr. Siegel also explains how his work was the first of its kind by scaling up enzyme design to hundreds of mutants instead of dozens.
Dr. Justin Siegel explains the past, present, and future of wet lab work and wet lab automation. We start by hearing a description of what it is like to work in a wet lab, covering the contrast between the excitement of seeing life changing results and the countless hours of monotony that is often involved to produce these results.
Dr. Afshin Beheshti begins this episode by explaining what microRNAs are and why they are emerging as an important area of biological research. He then explains how microRNAs relate to viruses, which is a recently developing area of research in this already young field of study. Dr. Beheshti then tells the story of how he started to discover that microRNAs could be a driver of COVID-19 infections.
This episode concludes the podcast’s series of episodes focused on space biology and space omics. NASA scientist Dr. Afshin Beheshti discusses the many high level hazards and corresponding molecular features of spaceflight throughout this episode. For instance, we begin with a discussion of the hazards of radiation and microgravity. Dr. Beheshti spends time explaining a high level view of what each hazard is, why it is a concern for spaceflight, and educates us on many useful and interesting pieces of information for each hazard. Further hazards discussed include confinement and isolation, hostile and closed environment, and distance from Earth.
This episode discusses Dr. Tejaswini Mishra’s recent publication in Nature Biomedical Engineering: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-020-00640-6 Dr. Mishra begins the episode by explaining the origin story of this work and how the idea for this paper came to be. She then explains how this study enrolled thousands of participants and used the participants’ smartwatch or wearable device data to detect COVID-19 infections. After explaining how this study began, Dr. Mishra discusses how she and her team came up with two main algorithms for detecting COVID-19 infections from wearables data. Dr. Mishra also discusses the many variables that could be monitored with wearables in addition to standard measures used for predicting illnesses like heart rate. Finally, we hear about the main results of this study including the successful detection of several active COVID-19 infections in study participants. We also hear a comparison of this work against the COVID-19 wearables study featured previously on the podcast. We end by hearing Dr. Mishra’s thoughts on the future of wearables for detecting infectious diseases and for improving human health in general.