Belated congratulations to the Newcastle team who won a gold medal the 2008 iGEM contest with a cheap biosensor for pathogens that used a biological implementation of an artificial neural network (life imitating art imitating life?), modelling the regulatory networks with CellML and simulation software to help them evolve a predictable circuit. Two of the team members, Mike Cooling and James Lawson are at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute, for which I’m an advisor. ABI was one of the major developers of the CellML standard. Great job, all! (updated at 11am to reflect that they won a gold medal, not the whole contest)
