BioBuilder book and Biological Engineering
I’m excited by the new O’Reilly book BioBuilder: Rethinking the biological sciences as engineering disciplines, as I’ve watched the BioBuilder and IGEM Parts projects passively over the last few years work towards repeatable programming of biological components. While that’s a whole topic of its own, the release of this book co-authored by Natalie Kuldell reminded me to look at the MIT OCW site for the Biological Engineering department where she is faculty. I’ve been somewhat hesitant to jump into this field for lack of background, but reviewing the course list made me realize I’ve skimmed into likely pre-requisites a fair bit over the last year.
The following courses appear to have a good selection of material (video lectures or lecture notes, assignments or exams with solutions) that I’ll consider working through them this year:
- Chemicals in the Environment: Toxicology and Public Health (BE.104J) from 2005 from 2005, lecture notes for background, quantitative risk assessment, but not toxicology; problem sets and exams.
- Systems Microbiology from 2006. Lecture notes, slides, problem sets, and exams.
- Analysis of Biomolecular and Cellular Systems from 2012. Lecture notes, and partial problem sets / exams from 2009-2012.
- Thermodynamics of Biomolecular Systems from 2005. Lecture notes.
- Materials for Biomedical Applications from 2006. Lecture notes, problem sets, and example final exam.
- Molecular Structure of Biological Materials (BE.442) from 2005. Lecture notes and exam.
- Foundations of Computational and Systems Biology from 2014. Video lectures, notes, problem sets.
- Mechanisms of Drug Actions from 2013. Partial lecture notes, problem sets, and exams from 2011-2013.
I’ll update this post with links to any notes from reviewing these classes!