First International Conference on Biomolecular Engineering (ICBE)

Abstract

The First ICBE was held January 14−18, 2007 in Coronado, CA and was attended by 172 participants. We instituted and organized the ICBE in partnership with the Society for Biological Engineering (http://www.aiche.org/SBE/) as a response to the ongoing convergence of various subfields at the interface of molecular biology and the physical and engineering sciences. This meeting, which is to be held every 2 years, covers the breadth of Biomolecular Engineering and serves to promote, shape, and refine the definition of the field as a whole. The Theme of the first meeting was “Integration of Biological Design Principles, from Molecules to Cells,” and roughly 45 invited and contributed talks and 100 posters were presented. By most accounts, the term Biomolecular Engineering dates back to a highly influential meeting held at the National Institutes of Health in 1992, Research Opportunities in Biomolecular Engineering: The Interface Between Chemical Engineering and Biology, co-chaired by George Georgiou and Irene Glowinski. It was shortly before this time that researchers working in a variety of fields, such as biochemistry, enzymology, microbiology, cell biology, and immunology, began to embrace recombinant DNA and analogous techniques as routine. With the prospect of manipulating gene and protein expression, it was not long before biochemical engineers and other physical scientists, from both academia and industry, realized the potential power and applicability of these approaches, but with a different perspective and focus on quantitative design principles. Since 1992, a number of subfields have emerged and grown into established subareas of Biomolecular Engineering, including protein engineering, metabolic engineering, and cell and tissue engineering. Loosely defined, Biomolecular Engineering now refers to the multidisciplinary interface between modern molecular biology and quantitative engineering science. The program of the First ICBE was organized into three major research thrusts. A healthy proportion of the meeting attendees presented research in the area of Engineering Functional Biomolecules, representing the powerful experimental and computational approaches that have been brought to bear on the generation of biomolecules with enhanced or novel biological activities. Protein engineering remains at the core of this research area, but emerging efforts to engineer nucleic acids and small molecules were also well represented at the meeting. Other attendees were more closely identified with the area of Molecular Interactions and Intracellular Pathways. Presentations in this area focused on the characterization and manipulation of both metabolic and signal transduction pathways and networks in cells and the use of novel tools to quantify biomolecular interactions. Finally, the area of Systems Biology and Multiscale Integration covered the use of “-omic” approaches to globally monitor and characterize cellular processes and novel tools in synthetic and computational biology that might enable the integration of information across the various levels of biological complexity, from molecules to tissues. More and more, the lines between biological disciplines are becoming blurred. Within Biomolecular Engineering, we find elements of biochemistry/chemical biology, microbiology, cell biology, pharmacology, biophysics, materials science, and applied mathematics in addition to chemical engineering and biomedical engineering, which have coalesced under the common theme of molecular biology. Meanwhile, the postgenomic era has presented new challenges that will require quantitative approaches, and hence we contend that the ICBE's broad coverage of Biomolecular Engineering is timely and unique. The peer-reviewed papers contributed in this special issue, comprised of both review and original research articles, provide a sampling of the exciting work that was presented at the First ICBE. The Second ICBE will be held on January 18−22, 2009, in Santa Barbara. For more information, visit www.aiche.org/ICBE.