Implementation |
About
Progress in computing from the 20th and the begining of the 21st century enabled data driven global vision of the state of our planet. As networked technologies shed some light on the extent of global environmental crisis though the increased monitoring of natural ecosystems, these developements pushed us to realised our incapcity to interact with living system in an informed and vertuous way. We believe that differences in nature of information processing in living and inert system is central to this problem. Indeed, as digital computers compute solely through logic embeded in the flow of electrons, they remain blind to the massive amount of biochemical information that drive interaction in the natural world. To bridge this gap, and enable existing technologies to leverage the massive computing capacity of organic systems, interfaces need to be developed.
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Our team demonstrates bi-directional communication between bacteria and computers with the development of new wetware, hardware and software. Implication of these technologies are yet to be envisions, we present a vision of the future where DIY-minded people construct bioelectronic devices from the wetware and hardware tools in our collection.
These visions of the future have been developed and researched through multiple interviewsTo our Human Practices
Vision of the future 1 - autonomous biohybrid robots (biosensing and bioremediation in mobile robots)
Mobile robots can explore places that are generally hostile to humans, such as outer space, ocean depths, or toxic and dangerous environments. In the era of the Anthropocene, the extend of human impact on the environment is not completely understood.
We think of our toolkit as enabling the engineering of population of bacteria to behave like Bio Electronic components where an electrical input signal would be transformed by our processor plasmid and outputed as an electrically readable signal. Because of the Electrical In / Electrical Out nature of this interface, we could easilly envision to assemble physical individual computation in larger circuit (figure 1a and b)
Fig 1.a: Bio-Electronic Component in microfluidics
Fig 1.b: Circuit of Bio-Electronic Component in microfluidics
We propose an integration of these new kind of computers where bacteria live symbiotically inside a motile robot and collect data on the environment. Using a combination of our Processor and Output plasmids, bacteria could directly perform biosensing and computation transformed into an electronically readable signal. This signal would be processed by the hardware of the robot and uploaded to internet. The robot permits an action based on this data.
This action could be to remediate the dangerous presence of chemicals, by either directly releasing bioremediation products in a precise area, or sending a signal to halt the source of the dangerous chemical release. In a world where more solutions to climate change and environmental damage appear out of genetic engineering technology, we anticipate that combining the biosensing to the remediation could be automated with such bio-electronic robots. (fig 2)
Fig 2: Bio-Hybrid submarine robot for autonomous marine environment exploration
Vision of the future 2 - Electronically-induced bioreactors
Open source, benchtop, batch reactors to produce enzymes and chemicals have allowed a range of users in universities and biomarker spaces to contribute to an activity traditionally reserved to large companies. This is due to designs of bioreactors becoming cheaper and easier to build, increasing accessibility to users in resource-constrained contexts.
Some bioproducts of interests have a high metabolic cost or may be toxic in high concentration for cells in bioreactor setups. In these cases, cells rarely reach an density that is sufficient to extract a sufficient amount of bioproduct. To bypass this problem, chemical inducers can be added to the medium once the cells have reached a certain density. However this is an invasive procedure and can make pure extraction of the product difficult. New means of cybergenetic control, such as optogenetics have partly solved this issue by inducing expression through external light exposure. However, the main difficulty with optogenetics, is the ability for external light to reach the cells located in the centre of large bio-reactors.
Here we envision a future where our electronically-induced promoters, activate and control the production of bioproducts of interest in benchtop bioreactors through a programmed electrical current. An electrical current can propagate deeply in bioreactors in ways that light can't. The Arduino hardware used in our project to shock liquid cultures of bacteria with an electrical current is cheap and easy to automate for various uses.
We want creators of bioreactors to use our 96-well electroshock screening pipeline to explore the space of possible Electro-Genetic control for the expression of their product of interest. The Arduino voltage induction we use is in the form of an alternative current which presents three main parameters: amplitude, frequency and the pulse exposure period. We created an algorithm to dispatch electroshocks, mixing and matching these parameters. We hope users of our library Electro-Reactif promoters can play with this parameter to define the optimal settings for their bioproduct of interest. Machine-learning techniques could be incorporated to automate the optimisation space exploration even further.
Fig 3: Optimisation of Bio-Production
Vision of the future 3 - Bio-Electronic Music
The pass 10 years have witness a cultural shift in our relationship to the environments and to life on our planet.
Communicating with bacteria through a bio-digital interface can permit the biological activity of microorganisms to gain cultural significance. The New Media Art movement differentiates itself from conventional visual arts, by using electronic media to incorporate new technologies from science into art. The artworks tend to emphasize the forms of cultural practice that arise concurrently with emerging technological platforms.
We want to extend the uses of our hardware and synthetic biology tools to artists. Synthesisers are the instrument for electronic musicians, and the three plasmid system combining Inputs, Processors and Outputs, acts as a synthesiser by intaking an electronic signal, and sending it back transformed. The noise deriving from genetic signal transduction can be played with to generate complex musical sounds, thus signifying biological processes. We hope that, by opening new creative avenues, our the bio-electronic devices made with our toolkit will participate in the production of a new cultural paradigm where the understanding of biological questions and process is central to human societies.
Fig 4: Bio-Electronic Musical Synthetiser