On 10 October 2013 23:00, William Heath <wgheath@gmail.com> wrote:
-- All my ideas on synthetic biology have been peculating in my head for years. As a computer scientist I never understood how best to get into synthetic biology. After years of studying this new engineering discipline I have made a decision:I don't really care about lab work
As a person with quite a few years of IT infrastructure, and systems management I was convinced that I would find a bunch of stuff that I could apply my skills to in bio-engineering, and hence make a seamless career transition from media-tech to biotech in a reasonable time. (without getting my hands dirty .. in the wet lab)
However about half way through my Masters study I realised that a key difference between IT "Information technology" and the sort of technology that I am working with now (Lab automation), is that there is a clear distinction between the types of technology and how abstracted they are from that actual underlying process that you are trying to automate.
I am referring to the difference between "mature" web application technologies, that have little actual interface with the real world, and the sort of tech that is required for programming, and automating molecular biology. For many years, other than scanners and printers, my main equipment and software was limited to a web browser, a web server, a database, and some scripting or OO language to move around chunks of information.
However automating PCR, microscopy, or electrophoresis etc, and then processing the results is a whole different ball game. Much of the tech is really embedded into the process itself, literally in the case of arduino, and other control and data capture electronics...
If you insisted on remaining purely "in silico", then I suspect that you would be relegating yourself to a purely support role, as I think it is much easier to generate hypothesises than test them... ;-)
Anyway my idea is to create a website where synthetic biologists can submit their programming needs and computer scientists can assist them. I am curious about the best way to create such a website to make it easier for synthetic biologists to submit programming project requests/tasks. What input fields would help synthetic biologists enter in their programming tasks/projects? Do you feel such a site would as useful as I do?
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