Posted by
JonathanCline on July 2, 2009
Sometime in 1994, a university obtained some funding and set up BioMOO:
BioMOO is a virtual meeting place for biologists, connected to the Globewide Network Academy. The main physical part of BioMOO is located at the BioInformatics Unit of the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel.
BioMOO is a professional community of Biology researchers. It is a place to come meet colleagues in Biology studies and related fields and brainstorm, to hold colloquia and conferences, to explore the serious side of this new medium.
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Posted by
JonathanCline on July 1, 2009
I’ve now tested the digital microfluidics board via microcontroller. The digital microfluidics board moves a liquid droplet via Electrowetting-on-Dielectric (EWOD). The microcontroller switches the high voltage via a switching board (pictured below, using Panasonic PhotoMOS chips), which controls the +930VDC output by the HVPS (posted earlier), and runs over USB using no cost Processing.org software. This is alpha stage testing.. cleaner version to be built. The goal of course is to scale the hardware to allow automation of microbiology protocols.
Labview is quite expensive, and industrial-grade high voltage switching boards are also quite expensive. So I built my own hardware and the Processing.org language is an easy way to test things. The Processing.org language is a free, open source graphics/media/IO layer on top of Java (as posted previously here).
What follows is the super simple test software written in Processing.org & Java.
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Posted by
JonathanCline on June 26, 2009
The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars hosted a recent talk on Synthetic Biology, Patents, and Open Source. This talk is now available via the web; link below. I’ve written some comments on viewing the talk, also below.
WASHINGTON - Wednesday, June 17, 2009 - Synthetic biology is developing into one of the most exciting fields in science and technology and is receiving increased attention from venture capitalists, government and university laboratories, major corporations, and startup companies. This emerging technology promises not only to enable cheap, lifesaving new drugs, but also to yield innovative biofuels that can help address the world’s energy problems.
Today, advances in synthetic biology are still largely confined to the laboratory, but it is evident from early successes that the industrial potential is high. For instance, estimates by the independent research and advisory firm Lux Research indicate that one-fifth of the chemical industry (now estimated at $1.8 trillion) could be dependent on synthetic biology by 2015.
In an attempt to enable the technology’s potential, some synthetic biologists are building their own brand of open source science. But as these researchers develop the necessary technological tools to realize synthetic biology’s promises, there is as yet no legal framework to regulate the use and ownership of the information being created.
Will this open source movement succeed? Are life sciences companies ready for open source? What level of intellectual property (IP) protection is necessary to secure industry and venture capital involvement and promote innovation? And does open source raise broader social issues? On June 17, a panel of representatives from various sectors will discuss the major challenges to future IP developments related to synthetic biology, identify key steps to addressing these challenges, and examine a number of current tensions surrounding issues of use and ownership.
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Synthetic Biology: Feasibility of the Open Source Movement
Presenters:
- Arti K. Rai, Elvin R. Latty Professor of Law, Duke Law School
- Mark Bünger, Director of Research, Lux Research
- Pat Mooney, Executive Director, ETC Group
- David Rejeski, Moderator, Director, Synthetic Biology Project
While viewing the webcast (which we are all lucky to have viewable online), I wrote some comments. Since others were interested in the comments, I’ll post ‘em here.
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Posted by
JonathanCline on June 26, 2009
The Tecan Genesis Workstation 2000: It’s an industrial benchtop robot for liquid handling with multiple arms for tray handling and pipetting.
The robot’s operations are complex, so an integrated development environment is used to program it (though biologists wouldn’t call it an integrated development environment; maybe they’d call it a scripting application?), with custom graphical scripting language (GUI-based) and script verification/compilation. Luckily though, the application allows third party software access and has the ability to control the robotics hardware using a minimal command set. So what to do? Hack it, of course; in this case, with Perl. This is only a headache due to Microsoft Windows incompatibilities & limitations — rarely is anything on Windows as straightforward as Unix — so as usual with Microsoft Windows software, it took about three times longer than normal to figure out Microsoft’s quirks. Give me OS/X (a real Unix) any day. Now, on to the source code!
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