Hacking Biology: The Living Software Revolution

Aneesh Panoli
Nov 3 · 2 min read

When we write software, we write down the specifications first. As we iterate and improve the software, we go back and check if the development adheres to the specifications we began with.

I studied a particular type of cell division called meiosis during my Ph.D. It is an excellent example of living software. How do cells check and recheck if the program runs according to the specifications? For this reason, there are checkpoints in every step of the cell division to make sure that the cellular machinery is in ‘sync’. You can equate these checkpoints to for loops and while loops or to your favorite machine learning model that make predictions in terms of probabilities. Out of sync will lead to arming the checkpoints. The most important is the interplay of various cyclins, as depicted in the following figure.

The meiotic Cell division: Molecular Human Reproduction, Vol.15, №3 pp. 139–147, 2009

Using a number of observations such as the chromatin condensation, position of chromosomes and level of cyclins one can precisely pinpoint the different stages of cell division.

The breakthroughs in gene editing, computational power, and artificial intelligence will allow us to program living cells in ways we could not have imagined a decade ago.

How about embryonic stem cells that can develop into any specialized cell such as neurons, nephrons, myocytes. How does this program work?

This is a work in progress…

Aneesh Panoli
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