Team:SUSTC-Shenzhen-A/Human practice

iPhone: an important tool in biology research

In our human practice, we aim to investigate how an iPhone aids biologists in the lab.

  It is expected that the sales of iPhone and iPad will over 170 million. And the number of software in APP store has been as high as 700 thousand already. All these facts have shown us that the era of mobile information is coming. We can already feel the changes coming with it in the fields of communication, business and so on. Expecting to be one of the future researchers, we want to know what changes it will bring to the research in the future, especially in the field of synthesis biology.

  Now, let us tracing back the history, and see the connection between biology research and scientific computing tools.

1. The birth of computer In 1980s, IBM created the first personal computer. Since then, PC has spread rapidly, and bioinformatics was born with the trend. This in turn promoted the development of molecular biology.

2. The network technology E-mail and newsgroups have become the major communication tools of biology study. And the protocols used in the network have provided many new methods for biological information integration. And the biological database system is also developing.

3. Database technology, data mining techniques, mass storage technology Bioinformatics database has a complex data structure, a complex data organization and a rapid growth in the amount of data. The development of computer network as well as artificial intelligence has helped to improve the ability of biological information processing.

  So we can see that the development of synthesis biology is tightly connected with the improvement of the scientific computing tools. Now we have enough confidence to expect the coming of mobile biological information processing.

  When we are making such assertion, at the same time we have studied the software about synthesis biology on app store, to prove our words are not empty.

  The study above is mainly about the data, but how many software are really practical and user-friendly? Let’s take the most influential journals in synthesis biology as an example. We studied how many of them have apps.

  As what we have shown above, the development of mobile platform is only decades, and on which the development of scientific software is also at the very beginning, but no doubt the rapidly developing of them has already fulfill us with wonder. All sorts of software are at people’s fingertips, and an exponential growth has already been in sight. We believe that in the near future, the research of synthesis biology will usher in an era of mobile.