Biology Inspired Engineering - First Two Days
The beak of a squid is a very special organ. Though extremely hard, it contains no minerals and no metals. In fact, it is one of nature’s special examples for crystallized biopolymers - a class of materials with unique features that may find very interesting applications pretty soon. It was mentioned as an anecdote at one of the lectures I heard yesterday, at the first day of the ISBIE 2007 conference.
The first day included 8 lectures, of which I attended 7. Not that I intended to miss the eighth - it is just that I fell asleep at the noon break and didn’t wake up in time. This is what happens when you pick up a taxi at 05:30a.m. and try to concentrate through the rest of the day. Today, the second day, I attended all the lectures, but they were generally worse then yesterday’s. Still, some of the lectures were very inspiring and interesting; almost all were very educative and nice.
Some of the lectures, 4-5 yesterday and additional today, may even have relevance to my own work (it is still in an initial stage, so I’m collecting many ideas). Another 1 or 2 were nice, and only one lecture yesterday - given by a Taiwanian guy - seemed unconnected, at least to me. It was accompanied by another today, given by a Japanese guy, who at least was very funny.
Some of the more interesting stuff included a guy that plays with DNA and uses it as mechanical skeleton to build ctystals (he connects many strands together, using sticky ends and other neat stuff, ththen crystalizes the DNA at arbitrary shapes); the guy with the squids (did you know that 90% of marine biomass is actually bacteria? we’re not even scratching the surface. And what all the divers see… well, a drop in the ocean, really).
I was also intrigued by many chemical insights and nice pictures. Ada Yonath, for example, explained to us how ribosomes work (she should know - she discovered them), including nice movies and insights into antibiotics and how it works. It seems that the main difference between mamalian and bacterial ribosomes is… a single carbon atom. Over 40% of the antibiotics rely on this single atom to kill bacteria and not humans. More interesting, though, were some additional statements in her lecture. For example, she found that a ribosome taken from one of the two bacteria types that live in the dead sea (yes, it’s not really dead. At least two tiny life forms live in it) requires KCl at a ridiculous concentration of 3 Molar - a thousand times more then in normal cells - in addition to the usual sodium and magnesium ion requirements; in lower concentrations, actually, it doesn’t work. Other interesting note was that during the growth phase, about 80% of the cell’s energy is consumed by ribosomes. I bet the rest goes to heat.
We had other inspiring lectures. Did you know, for example, that if you put DNA strands in thin enough channels they will stretch themselves because it will be energetically more efficient then being curved and curled? Or that membrane nanopores create such an electric field gradient that actually forms a lens and attaches molecules to it? I saw some really cool movies about it!
Also very nice was this guy, Stupp, from Northwestern University; he works on regenerating neurons and other ways to elegantly heal wounds. I knew a lot of similar work that’s going on in the Technion these days, but movies of Parkinson-infected mice and how to heal them are always nice to look at; and I wasn’t aware that he works on it separately.
Lia Addadi from Weizman showed us antigens she made against crystals instead of against single molecules. It’s a cool idea, but it seems she spent 15 years on it - generations of her students built things one on top of the other without realising where they’s heading….
The day ended by a most funny Japanese guy that showed us movies of single organic molecules he managed to take by electron microscopy. It didn’t look too serious, only that nobody took such photos before (for some reason, people deemed it impossible. He managed to convince the Japanese government to invest some millions of dollars in building an appropriate microscope).
Over all - very nice talks, and the best is yet to come: I look forward to the closure lecture, which should be the highlight of the event, as it is given by a widely accepted guru.
