{"id":5044,"date":"2013-03-30T08:46:21","date_gmt":"2013-03-30T14:46:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=5044"},"modified":"2013-03-30T08:46:21","modified_gmt":"2013-03-30T14:46:21","slug":"how-to-make-a-computer-from-a-living-cell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=5044","title":{"rendered":"How to Make a Computer from a Living Cell"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/m.technologyreview.com\/news\/512901\/how-to-make-a-computer-from-a-living-cell\/\">Katherine Bourzac<\/a>: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>If biologists could put computational controls inside living cells, they could program them to sense and report on the presence of cancer, create drugs on site as they&#8217;re needed, or dynamically adjust their activities in fermentation tanks used to make drugs and other chemicals. Now researchers at Stanford University have developed a way to make genetic parts that can perform the logic calculations that might someday control such activities.<\/p>\n<p>The Stanford researchers&#8217; genetic logic gate can be used to perform the full complement of digital logic tasks, and it can store information, too. It works by making changes to the cell&#8217;s genome, creating a kind of transcript of the cell&#8217;s activities that can be read out later with a DNA sequencer. The researchers call their invention a &#8220;transcriptor&#8221; for its resemblance to the transistor in electronics. &#8220;We want to make tools to put computers inside any living cell\u2014a little bit of data storage, a way to communicate, and logic,&#8221; says Drew Endy, the bioengineering professor at Stanford who led the work.<\/p>\n<p>Timothy Lu, who leads the Synthetic Biology Group at MIT, is working on similar cellular logic tools. &#8220;You can&#8217;t deliver a silicon chip into cells inside the body, so you have to build circuits out of DNA and proteins,&#8221; Lu says. &#8220;The goal is not to replace computers, but to open up biological applications that conventional computing simply cannot address.&#8221;<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Katherine Bourzac: If biologists could put computational controls inside living cells, they could program them to sense and report on the presence of cancer, create drugs on site as they&#8217;re needed, or dynamically adjust their activities in fermentation tanks used to make drugs and other chemicals. Now researchers at Stanford University have developed a way [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5044"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5044"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5044\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}