User:TSantala

Name: Timo Santala (Tee-mo San-tall-uh)

From: Long Island, NY

Home: Pegram 313, East Campus

Major: BME and MEMS

Hey, why are you on my page? You better not be poaching my Grand Challenge article...

GRAND CHALLENGE ARTICLE:

[http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/37/5/e39.full.pdf+html An efficient platform for genetic selection and screening of gene switches in Escherichia coli], Nucleic Acids Research, accepted January 8, 2009, accessed September 20, 2011 (Grand Challenge - Engineer better medicines)

This article was put out by the biomedical research laboratory that I worked as a lab-assistant at over the summer of 2010. The research outlined in this paper involves developing a platform for more effectively engineering riboswitches. Riboswitches are RNA structures that may alter genetic pathways and thus change genetic expression of organisms; they are an integral part of genetic engineering. Aptazymes (which I worked with) are riboswitches that are able to not only introduce new genes into an organism, but regulate the degree of expression of these new genes according to the presence or absence of specific ligands. Aptazymes, specifically, are significant to the medical field as they can introduce therapeutic genes to patients while avoiding the toxic effects of over-expressing foreign genes. Riboswitches as a whole may dominate the medical field in future decades as we augment, recurcuit, or alter human DNA to prevent disease.

MATLAB DEMONSTRATIONS

I found the most interesting demo available on Matlab to be the 'game of life'. It is interesting that you can develop a pretty complex game with such simple paramaters: according to the number of adjacent "cells", a cell will either multiply or die. It is also interesting to consider how this game relates to real microbial organisms - left alone they may die of overexposure to surroundings, while if packed together too tightly they may die from physical stress or lack of nutrition. The premise of this game is certainly cool, but people online take it a step further and manipulate the known parameters to create patterns, where they carefully design the initial layout of cells that will fall into some interesting loop of reactions.