4 April, 2016, USA: Seems like technology and computerisation is getting into the groves of mankind and humans are making most of it by utilising it to the maximum. Recently, MIT biological engineers and researchers have developed programming language that allows them to rapidly design complex, DNA-encoded circuits that give new functions to living cells.
This newly designed language, powers the user to write and design a program according to his needs, such as detecting and responding to certain environmental conditions. Users can then generate a DNA sequence that will achieve it.
Briefing about the functions of the language, Christopher Voigt, Professor Of Biological Engineering, MIT said, “It is literally a programming language for bacteria. You use a text-based language, just like you’re programming a computer. Then you take that text and you compile it and it turns it into a DNA sequence that you put into the cell, and the circuit runs inside the cell.”
Voigt and colleagues at Boston University and the National Institute of Standards and Technology have used this language, which they describe in the April 1 issue of Science, to build circuits that can detect up to three inputs and respond in different ways. Future applications for this kind of programming include designing bacterial cells that can produce a cancer drug when they detect a tumour, or creating yeast cells that can halt their own fermentation process if too many toxic by products build up, reports MIT News.
Image- research.microsoft.com
