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Eterna players were able to design molecular calculators which could revolutionize global health, low-energy computing, and biosensing - lets talk about why this is exciting! (1/7)

Sensors are all over the place in biology - organisms are constantly maintaining activity of internal systems and responding to the environment. We can build on these natural systems to design our own biomolecular computers. (2/7)

A paper published in Nature Chemistry at the end of last year (doi.org/10.1038/s415...) describes how we did exactly this, designing a fast, low-cost, easily-deployable diagnostic for active TB, a leading global health crisis. (3/7)

The paper also describes how this could lead to impacts beyond diagnostics, like directed drug delivery and safe precision gene editing. You could even imagine how this could be used for, say, environmental monitoring (think water quality or molecule presence). (4/7)

The insights generated by Eterna participants were crucial - their exploratory process and unique perspective is what created the heuristics needed for the success of automated mechanisms which can further accelerate design and deployment of technologies using this approach. (6/7)