Engineering Principles of Living Organisms

Catalog description

This course will explore how engineering principles apply to living organisms. E SC 386 Engineering Principles of Living Organisms (3) This course uses an engineering approach that applies basic physical and mathematical principles to the fundamental problems living organisms encounter. The objectives of the course are to understand the role of scaling in size and construction trade-offs in living organisms, how diffusion shapes and limits cellular processes, the role of electrical fields and concentration gradients in signaling, the statistical mechanics of ion channel and receptor gating, how the dynamics of transcriptional interactions can generate genetic circuits, the role of mechanical amplification in hearing. At the completion of the course, students will have insight into how to use quantitative techniques from engineering and the physical sciences to analyze biological systems.