cell culture

How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology

“Bold and intriguing.”—Wall Street Journal • “Penetrating. . . . Provocative and profound.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) • “Offers plenty of food for thought.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)  “Ball’s marvelous book is both wide-ranging and deep. . . . I could not put it down.”—Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Song of the Cell and the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Emperor of All Maladies A new, cutting-edge vision of biology that revises our understanding of what life itself is, how to enhance it, and what possibilities it offers.   Biology is undergoing a quiet but profound transformation. Several aspects of the standard picture of how life works—the idea of the genome as a blueprint, of genes as instructions for building an organism, of proteins as precisely tailored molecular machines, of cells as entities with fixed identities, and more—have been exposed as incomplete, misleading, or wrong.   In How Life Works, Philip Ball explores the new biology, revealing life to be a far richer, more ingenious affair than we had guessed. Ball explains that there is no unique place to look for an answer to this question: life is a system of many levels—genes, proteins, cells, tissues, and body modules such as the immune system and the nervous system—each with its own rules and principles. How Life Works explains how these levels operate, interface, and work together (most of the time).   With this knowledge come new possibilities. Today we can redesign and reconfigure living systems, tissues, and organisms. We can reprogram cells, for instance, to carry out new tasks and grow into structures not seen in the natural world. As we discover the conditions that dictate the forms into which cells organize themselves, our ability to guide and select the outcomes becomes ever more extraordinary. Some researchers believe that ultimately we will be able to regenerate limbs and organs, and perhaps even create new life forms that evolution has never imagined.   Incorporating the latest research and insights, How Life Works is a sweeping journey into this new frontier of the life sciences, a realm that will reshape our understanding of life as we know it.

b.next: rebuilding biology for engineering

Rewilding cultures

Rewilding Cultures is a new step of Feral Labs Network. The project was initiated and si coordinated by Projekt Atol Institute (SI) in partnership with Schmiede (AT), Cultivamos Cultura (PT), Ionian University (GR), The Culture Yard (DK), Udruga Radiona (HR), Bioart Society (FI) and Makery.info (FR)

The evolving concept of cell identity in the single cell era

Summary: This Spotlight explores emerging technologies that are enabling the systematic and unbiased quantification of cell identity, and how these efforts will enable the construction of high-resolution, dynamic cell atlases.

Genspace

Genspace is the world’s first community biology lab—a place where anyone can learn and work on biotechnology.

For the First Time, a Cell Built From Scratch Grows and Divides | Quanta Magazine

Scientists built a synthetic cell that combines more lifelike properties than ever before — proof of concept that it’s possible to bring nonliving materials to life, or something close to it, in the lab.

For the First Time, a Cell Built From Scratch Grows and Divides | Quanta Magazine

Scientists built a synthetic cell that combines more lifelike properties than ever before — proof of concept that it’s possible to bring nonliving materials to life, or something close to it, in the lab.

How to understand cells, tissues and organisms as agents with agendas | Aeon Essays

Biology’s next great horizon is to understand cells, tissues and organisms as agents with agendas (even if unthinking ones)

On cell types and cell states

The advent of single-cell genomics has brought about new efforts to characterize and catalog all of the cell types in the human body. Despite these efforts, the very definition of a “cell type” is under debate. In this post, I will discuss a conceptual framework for defining cell types as subsets of states in an underlying cellular state space. Moreover, I will link the cellular state space to biomedical ontologies that attempt to capture biological knowledge regarding cell types.

Opinion | Educate Your Immune System (Published 2016)

Our bodies are confused by this 21st-century world.

Accelerating life sciences research

Discover how a specialized AI model, GPT-4b micro, helped OpenAI and Retro Bio engineer more effective proteins for stem cell therapy and longevity research.

Sleuths flag ‘complete mismatch’ in data of BMJ stem cell study | Manoj Lalu

This is disappointing, but I’m not surprised. I was one of the reviewers for the initial version. You can see by my review (it’s all open) that I flagged primary outcome switching, a complete lack of any data on the cells themselves, and sample size inconsistencies in the protocol versus the report (and within the report). The data seemed impressive. Too good to be true I guess? I never saw the paper again in peer review after that initial review. The next notification I received was that the paper was accepted. Given BMJ’s commitment to open peer review and post-publication scrutiny (which I admire), I have no doubt we will hear about a formal editorial investigation soon.

Edison Scientific Assembles Millennium Problems for Biology | Samuel G. Rodriques posted on the topic | LinkedIn

In light of the progress in mathematics, we at Edison Scientific and FutureHouse have assembled a set of Millennium Problems for Biology. They are chosen to be very hard to solve but very easy to validate in a simple laboratory environment. Any of these, if solved, would mark a major advance in biotechnology, and most of them would contribute materially towards curing disease. These are, in some sense, the “last reasonable eval” for AI in biology. This was work primarily by Michaela Hinks and myself, with contributions from many others. Short descriptions below. The full descriptions of the problems with acceptance criteria are at millenniumproblems.bio. Share more if you have ideas. If they meet our criteria, we’ll add them to our list (with attribution and permission). A few notes on exclusion/inclusion criteria: -We placed a major emphasis on ease of validation, so challenges like “solve aging” are omitted. These should all be validatable in a standard wet lab in a short period of time (days, maybe a week or two.) -We placed a major emphasis on ensuring grading would be as objective as possible, so many great basic science mysteries are also omitted, because it would be very challenging to tell when the mystery was “solved.” (E.g., “uncover the function of the Vault protein,” or “explain how the Oxytricha genome works.”) -We placed a major emphasis on ensuring the problems would be understandable to anyone with a basic biology background, so some highly technical but very important challenges were also omitted. Finally, we anticipate that some problems may require edits in response to community feedback. If you think we got them wrong, please send the feedback, and we will collate and update. Thanks to Adam Marblestone, Michael Baym, Erika DeBenedictis, and Tony Kulesa for reviews. | 52 comments on LinkedIn

I’m going to cure my girlfriend’s brain tumor.

Launch of an experiment to use AI-Scientists to accelerate research of a "solved" disease.

No. 004: HAI AI Index, virtual cell automation, MCP for scientific literature - The Hallway Track

The Hallway Track No. 004 - How AI is affecting the practice of science