« »

Biotechnology and the Singularity

June 26, 2010 at 7:51 pm
filed under Biotechnology, Singularity
Tagged Biotechnology, Singularity

The life sciences include fields like biology, biochemistry, microbiology, genetics, medicine, and many others.  Truly remarkable strides were made in all these fields in the 20^th century.  Vaccinations, transplants, antibiotics, and many other innovations were introduced.  The structure of DNA was discovered.  The life expectancy in the United States went from the mid-forties to the mid-seventies.  Progress was phenomenal.

But as the 21^st century dawned a new development was occurring that promises to revolutionize all these fields and further accelerate progress.  This development is the introduction of information technology into the life sciences.  As in every other area into which information technology has been introduced, the results have been dramatic.  The first great triumph of this approach was the sequencing of the human genome, along with the sequencing of many other species.  This could not have occurred without the application of information technology.  Indeed, improved algorithms partway through shortened the process considerably.  For a history see Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genome_project).

A much more difficult problem is that of protein folding.  As large and complex as DNA is, some proteins can be even larger and more complex.  DNA has one basic pattern that is repeated over and over and it always has the double helix shape.  Proteins come in all sizes and shapes.  Finally, of course, there is only one DNA molecule while there are thousands or even millions of different proteins.

Proteins are built in the cell out of amino acids.  At some point the protein folds up into a three-dimensional structure.  This three-dimensional aspect is extremely important.  If the protein did not fold up into the right shape it would not be able to perform its function.  Having the right shape allows it to interact with other proteins in the body.  The problem from the information technology point of view is to simulate how proteins fold using software.  This problem is extremely complicated and requires enormous amounts of computation.  One somewhat successful simulation of a virus of approximately one million atoms would require something like 35 years to run on a typical desktop computer.
( http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/STMV/ )

 Here are some articles about the use of simulations to model protein folding.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_folding
http://www.ram.org/research/pfp.html
http://www.nature.com/horizon/proteinfolding/background/importance.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_structure_prediction

Here are another couple of other interesting links.  The first is an article from 2003 and shows how even then information technology was playing an enormous role in biology.  The second defines some terms.

http://cbcl.mit.edu/news/files/TR-100-Riesenhuber-03.pdf 
http://www.csd.uwo.ca/~lila/biocomp.html 

Finally here is a recent article about modeling gene functionality:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100131142436.htm

So by using computers and information technology life science researchers can tackle problems that would be impossible otherwise.  The benefits will be enormous, and as more and more computational power becomes available the importance of this use of information technology will continue to increase.

no comments

RSS / trackback

respond

you must be logged in to post a comment.