Team:Shanghaitech/YuanBo
Yuan Bo
Dr. Yuan is an Electronic Engineering professor of Jiao Tong University. As an expert in electronic circuit and signal process, Yuan followed the frontier of synthetic biology for years out of his own interest. His current research area is nonlinear circuits, including gene circuits. Our team members held a teleconference with Dr. Yuan to seek his insights for our project and purpose.
As a professor of Electronic Engineering, why are you interested in biological circuits and synthetic biology?
“For around 20 years I worked with different electronic circuits, gradually I consider circuits with more general mechanism. Metaphysically, circuits are everywhere in nature, by studying this nature circuit design we could strengthen and improve our understanding of the artificial electronic circuit. For these reasons, I continuously pay close attention to the frontier of life science. Among all the branches, synthetic biology is most inspiring to me. In synthetic biology, researchers learn the principles to design life, and breakthroughs have been done by building life de novo and artificially. Somehow, it’s very similar to the studies of electronic circuit: build to learn, and learn to build.”
In your opinion, what are the main differences and similarities between the electronic circuits and biological circuits like gene circuits?
“Biological problems are different from chemical and electronic cases in the way that time-space inconsistency exists almost everywhere in biological circuits. Let’s think about quorum sensing. It’s a system where the numbers of bacteria, factors like concentration, signal intensity are inconsistent. The diffusion of signal molecule in solution might not be so evenly, thus some bacteria are activated while others are not activated at the same time. This is a dynamics problem worth thinking about. You need to remind yourself that dealing with biological circuits is never like that with electronic circuits.”
As an expert in electronic circuits, how do you think about the significance of our project?
“Problems in vivo are far more complex and interesting, for its nonlinear and randomness quality, as I just said. I’ve noticed you tend to build an orthogonal signaling system in bacteria. Orthogonality is seldom a noteworthy problem in electronic circuits, but for you this is essential. Therefore, your work on building, testing and modeling orthogonal parts might help form a better recognition on biological circuits and systems. I think this is one of the most meaningful parts for your project.”
