BioCoder #9

Foreword

Mike Loukides

In past issues of BioCoder, we’ve published about the problem of reproducibility in science and its connection to lab automation and the revolution in software tools for the life sciences.

In BioCoder #9, these themes come around again in exciting new ways. I’ve always thought of lab robots in terms of fluid handling, but Dave Zucker takes robotics into a different direction: can you automate the handling and classification of fruit flies, the raw material of many genetics experiment? The FlySorter represents both clever mechanical design and a collaboration with computer vision experts. It’s a work in progress that I want to watch very closely.

Edward Perello writes about Putting the Tech in Biotech. We have many tools for design and engineering in synthetic biology. The problem is that they aren’t good tools. They’re tools written by biologists, who understand the biological issues, but don’t understand how to build tools that are intuitive and easy to use. While we’ve all used software that’s neither pleasant nor intuitive, the problem is almost always that the coders never talked to the users and never understood the problems they were trying to solve. Perello suggests ways to bridge the gap among the programmers, designers, and biologists: these collaborations, possibly like the team that was building the FlySorter, allow programmers and computer scientists to make important contributions without requiring them to become biologists.

When they discuss ...