Biotechnology Process Engineering Center

Teaching Engineers a Foundation in Biology

For biological engineering to become established alongside more traditional fields of engineering—mechanical, electrical, etc.—innovative pathways between biology and engineering are needed. The Biotechnology Process Engineering Center (BPEC) helped to found MIT's Biological Engineering Division in 1998 and continues to develop creative ways to link biology and engineering.

The MIT Course "Laboratory Fundamentals in Biological Engineering" (BE.109) is a state-of-the-art lab course now available from MIT's Biological Engineering Division. Taught by BPEC faculty member Leona Samson, and co-developed by BPEC faculty member Dane Wittrup, this course presents experimental techniques in biology and biochemistry from a quantitative engineering perspective, using the modern tools of genetic regulation to teach students to manipulate gene expression in cells.

The course is presented in four discovery-based modules. The first, Protein Engineering, gives students practice with a state-of-the-art combinatorial library screening methodology and introduces them to the chemistry of binding affinity. The second module, Protein Chemistry, teaches students to perform studies of enzyme kinetics. Genetic Engineering teaches students how to manipulate DNA sequences. Students use the latest technologies to apply vector design and construction. They also learn about mammalian cell culture, cell differentiation, and homologous recombinational repair. The last module, Phenotypic Engineering, teaches students how to manipulate gene expression in eukaryotic cells using RNAi, and how to develop assays for quantitative automated phenotypic readouts using array technology.

This course at MIT's School of Engineering acquaints students from more traditional fields of engineering with the concepts of biotechnology, preparing them for research at BPEC as undergraduates in the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, or as graduate students in a Masters or Ph.D. program.

To learn more about this topic:
See the Biotechnical Process Engineering Center's web site at http://web.mit.edu/bpec/

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Prof. Leona Samson guides BE.109 students through
an experiment.

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Last modified: February 25, 2005