chemist at the University of Glasgow, UK. "Evolution created biology, not the other way around." It led to the astonishing complexity of the biological world and Cronin believes that it is the perfect solution for materials science too.
"We needed a process to generate physical entities, put them into an environment and see if they live or die," he explains. For this, Cronin and colleagues in the EU project EVOBLISS designed a modular robot that would mix oil droplets on a petri dish and move them around. The behavior of the droplet was recorded, along with the starting conditions that created it.
In this way, they could screen and select droplets with certain material characteristics: if they behaved in the desired way they 'lived' and the conditions to create it survived. If they didn't they 'died' and were discarded.
This type of evolutionary search greatly cuts down on time and costs because the robot performs thousands of trials without interruption. For Cronin though, the real advantage of the approach goes beyond screening. "Evolution does so much more, it generates novelty to solve problems you never thought possible," he says. With the robot they can explore unexpectedness, meaning when a droplet behaves in a novel way, the conditions can be saved and further optimised.
The concept of using evolution-powered computers is proving incredibly effective for dealing with complex systems. Alfonso Jaramillo, Professor of Synthetic Biology at the University of Warwick, UK, developed a similar approach to solve complex biological problems like combatting antimicrobial resistance. In his evolutionary computer, real bacteria are altered to avoid being infected by bacteriophages. When a phage 'solves' the problem of beating the bacteria's defenses it survives. There are incalculable amounts of molecular interactions occurring during this process, but, according to Jaramillo, "when evolution takes place you already know the outcome of the reaction." The computation is done within the virus itself and the data stored in its genome.
0 comments:
Post a Comment