Ultra Energy Efficient Systems in Biology, Engineering, and Medicine
Event details
| Date | 01.10.2013 |
| Hour | 16:00 |
| Speaker |
Prof. Rahul Sarpeshkar, MIT Bio: Rahul Sarpeshkar is a tenured professor at MIT where he heads a research group on Analog Circuits and Biological Systems (http://www.rle.mit.edu/acbs/). His bioengineering group creates novel wet DNA-protein circuits in living cells and also advanced dry nanoelectronic circuits on silicon chips. His longstanding work on analog and biological computation and his recent work in NATURE (May 2013) have helped pioneer the field of analog synthetic biology. His work on a glucose fuel cell for medical implants was featured by Scientific American among 2012's 10 World Changing Ideas and also by the BBC, Economist, and Science News. He was an invited speaker at the 2011 Frontiers of Engineering Conference, hosted by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). He holds over 30 patents and has authored more than 120 publications, including one that was featured on the cover of Nature. His recent book, Ultra Low Power Bioelectronics: Fundamentals, Biomedical Applications, and Bio-inspired Systems contains a broad and deep treatment of ultra energy efficient systems in biology, engineering, and medicine with applications to implantable medical devices for the deaf, blind, and paralyzed. His group holds several first or best world records in analog, bio-inspired, synthetic biology, medical device, ultra low power, and energy harvesting systems. He has received several awards including the NSF Career Award, the ONR Young Investigator Award, and the Packard Fellows Award. He received Bachelor’s degrees in Electrical Engineering and Physics at MIT and a PhD at CalTech. Before he joined MIT’s faculty, he was a member of the technical staff of Bell Labs’ division of biological computation. |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
Mother Nature is a great analog and digital circuit designer. She has innovated circuits in the biochemical, biomechanical, and bioelectronic domains that operate robustly with highly noisy and imprecise parts and with incredibly low levels of energy. Her impressive accomplishment is largely due to the fact that she uses both analog (graded) and digital (all-or-none) circuits within her cells to sense, actuate, compute, and communicate. Analog and bio-inspired approaches that mimic nature can also create ultra-energy-efficient systems: For example, we were recently able to show how brain implants for the paralyzed could be powered from a novel glucose fuel cell that harvests energy from bodily fluids. In this talk, I shall discuss how a positive-feedback loop between analog circuits and cell biology may enable similar synergistic improvements in synthetic and systems biology.
The deep connection between analog circuits and cell biology arises because there are astounding similarities between the equations that describe noisy electronic flow in sub-threshold transistors and the equations that describe noisy molecular flow in chemical reactions, both of which obey the laws of exponential thermodynamics. Based on these similarities, we have engineered logarithmic analog computation in living cells with less than three transcription factors, almost two orders of magnitude more efficient than prior digital approaches. In addition, highly computationally intensive noisy DNA-protein and protein-protein networks can be rapidly simulated in mixed-signal supercomputing chips that naturally capture their noisiness, dynamics, and loading interactions at lightning-fast speeds. Such an approach may enable large-scale design and analysis in synthetic and systems biology that is faithful to how messy analog biology works, quite different from clean, well-defined digital design.
Note that Prof. Sarpeshkar will also participate in 2 satellite events: he will give a seminar in Neuchâtel and a seminar in Basel at the following times:
October 2nd, 17:00
3rd floor CSEM headquarters (Jacquet-Droz 7, Neuchâtel)
October 4th, 13:30
ETHZ Basel, BSSE Building, room WRO 1058 (Misrock Lecture Room).
http://www.bsse.ethz.ch/bel/HowtoFindUs/index
The deep connection between analog circuits and cell biology arises because there are astounding similarities between the equations that describe noisy electronic flow in sub-threshold transistors and the equations that describe noisy molecular flow in chemical reactions, both of which obey the laws of exponential thermodynamics. Based on these similarities, we have engineered logarithmic analog computation in living cells with less than three transcription factors, almost two orders of magnitude more efficient than prior digital approaches. In addition, highly computationally intensive noisy DNA-protein and protein-protein networks can be rapidly simulated in mixed-signal supercomputing chips that naturally capture their noisiness, dynamics, and loading interactions at lightning-fast speeds. Such an approach may enable large-scale design and analysis in synthetic and systems biology that is faithful to how messy analog biology works, quite different from clean, well-defined digital design.
Note that Prof. Sarpeshkar will also participate in 2 satellite events: he will give a seminar in Neuchâtel and a seminar in Basel at the following times:
October 2nd, 17:00
3rd floor CSEM headquarters (Jacquet-Droz 7, Neuchâtel)
October 4th, 13:30
ETHZ Basel, BSSE Building, room WRO 1058 (Misrock Lecture Room).
http://www.bsse.ethz.ch/bel/HowtoFindUs/index
Practical information
- General public
- Free