From Circuits to Cells: Bridging Biology and Electrical Engineering
Both my parents are electrical engineers who spent their careers designing circuits: the networks of components that make up the devices ubiquitous to our modern lives. When I was a younger, I found the idea of designing circuits to be dry and uninspiring. I was instead drawn to the mystery of life and chose to study biology rather than follow in my parent’s footsteps. Little did I know that years later, my obsession with biology would bring me close to my parent’s electrical engineering: as my parents engineered electrical networks, I would reverse-engineer biological ones.
Before I started my graduate degree, I worked at a preclinical lab where I tested drugs on brain cancer. I learned that no successful treatments for this fatal disease had been found in decades and I felt like I was blindly throwing darts at a wall, hoping for something to stick. Frustrated with this experience, I realized that the reason why decades of searching for treatments have failed was that we understood neither brain cancer in particular, nor the biological networks that govern both proper bodily function and disease in general.
Now in graduate school, I am currently working on understanding these biological networks, specifically the network that cells use to make decisions about growth. All cells take in an incredible amount information about nutrients and stress to make decisions about growth. To turn this information into a decision, cells send this information through a highly complex network of proteins and genes, in a similar way that a computer processes information through a network of computer parts. When this cellular computer breaks, cells make “bad” decisions and diseases occur: for example, cancer occurs when cells decide to grow when they are not supposed to. Historically, the growth control system has been studied by identifying the function of individual proteins that make up the system. However, individual parts work in the context of the whole system: just as characterizing an individual computer component doesn’t scratch the surface what a computer does, identifying the function of individual proteins doesn’t explain the growth control system.
I am specifically working on four proteins called transcription factors that tell growth genes to turn on and off. In isolation, these four proteins seem like identical components: they all respond to the same signals, and they talk to the same genes. However, I have found that in cells responding to starvation the level and timing of the activity of each of these four proteins is different, showing that they have different functions in the context of the growth control network. In the future I plan to further characterize the differences between these four components both in terms of how the activity of the four proteins are controlled, and in terms of what the effect of the four proteins are on the genes they act on.
Beyond contributing to an understanding of diseases like cancer, I find studying these biological networks fascinating in their own right. All organisms, from single celled bacteria to complex plants and animals, are composed of these biological networks. And while there are many differences in the details of these networks between organisms, there are also many shared design principals in these diverse networks. What excites me most is about my work is that I get to further our understanding the principals of these networks, and therefore the principles of life. And once we understand the design principals of living things, we can apply that understanding to design new forms of life. My parents apply design principles of electrical engineering to create electrical devices. I envision a future where bio-engineers apply design principles of biological circuits to create biological devices, synthetic organisms that we can use to sense pollution, sequester greenhouse gasses, or manufacture materials.