The CBCD is developing new ways to design, build and analyze biological circuits. Biological circuits control information flow in biological systems, and as such are a core area of Information Science and Technology. The study of circuits cuts across vast areas of biology, from biochemistry, biophysics and genetics, to cell and developmental biology, to neurobiology and ecology. Understanding how to design and build circuits is crucial for the next generation of bioengineering. The study of biological circuits also opens up new areas for theory in computation. We combine the experimental biologist's desire to abstract the key principles from the richness and diversity of biological circuits, the physicist's sense of measurement and of simple underlying mechanisms, and the engineer's aesthetic of "to build is to understand," The CBCD is an interdisciplinary group of biologists and engineers from a broad range of engineering and biology disciplines.

Goals: We will deduce simple rules about biological circuits and understand how they act in circuits at the levels of molecules, cells, organisms and ecosystems. We will learn how to model, design, build and analyze biological circuits. We will forge effective interdisciplinary research teams and train interdisciplinary researchers, with fundamental connections between engineering and circuit biology, systems and molecular neuroscience.

• Biologists have identified every individual gene in the genomes of several organisms. While this has been quite an accomplishment in itself, the further goal of figuring out how these genes interact is daunting. The difficulty lies in the fact that two genes can pair up in a gigantic number of ways. If an organism has a genome of 20,000 genes, the total number of possible pairwise combinations is a staggering total of 200 million. Dr. Weiwei Zhong, a postdoctoral scholar, and Paul Sternberg, Thomas Hunt Morgan Professor of Biology, have derived a method of database-mining to make predictions about genetic interactions. This will allow researchers to prioritize which experiments to undertake regarding gene-gene interactions. In the March 10 issue of the journal Science, Zhong and Sternberg report on a procedure for computationally integrating several sources of data from several organisms to study the tiny worm C. elegans, or nematode, an animal commonly used in biological experiments. Organisms share an enormous amount of genetic information - humans and nematodes, for example, are similar in 40 percent of their genes. So gene interaction in one species may shed light on the same interaction in another. Zhong has a doctorate in biology and a master's in computer science: she spends about as much time working on computer databases as she does in the lab with the organisms themselves. "This is the new generation of biologists," Sternberg says. Read more...
  
  

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