Biological engineering

Overview

Biological Engineering (including biological systems engineering and bioengineering) is a form of biotechnology that uses broad-based engineering disciplines of product design, sustainability and analysis to improve and focus utilization of biological systems. Biological Engineering is a discipline that applies engineering principles to biological systems for the purpose of developing new technologies of services to improve the living standards of societies. It exploits new developments in molecular biology, biochemistry, cell metabolism, microbiology, ecology and engineering principles and applies them in order to understand living systems and to bring solutions to various problems associated with these systems.

Biological Engineering employs knowledge and expertise from a number of pure and applied sciences, such as: mass and heat transfer, kinetics, biocatalysts, biomechanics, bioinformatics, separation, and purification processes, bioreactor design, surface science, fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, and polymer science that constitute the fundamentals of engineering, and couples them with knowledge in biological sciences such as genetics, molecular biology, protein chemistry, cytology, neurobiology, immunology, ecology, and pharmacology, aiming to solve the different problems of the various sectors of modern societies.

Because other engineering disciplines also address living organisms (e.g., prosthetics in mechanical engineering), the term biological engineering can be applied more broadly to include food engineering and biotechnology. Biological Engineering is called Bioengineering by some colleges and Biomedical engineering is called Bioengineering by others, and is a rapidly developing field with fluid categorization. However, the Main Fields of Biological Engineering may be categorised as:

Bioprocess Engineering; Bioprocess Design, Biocatalysis, Bioseparation Bioinformatics.
Genetic Engineering; Synthetic Biology, Cell Engineering, Tissue Culture Engineering, Horizontal gene transfer.
Biomedical Engineering; Biomedical technology; Biomedical Diagnosis, Biomedical Therapy, Biomechanics, Biomaterials.
Agricultural engineering; Ecological Engineering.

Biological Engineers are engineers who use the principles of biology and the tools of engineering to create usable tangible products. In general, biological engineers attempt to 1) mimic biological systems in order to create products or 2) modify and control biological systems so that they can replace, augment, or sustain chemical and mechanical processes.

File:Spread of Disease.JPG

Modeling of the Spread of Disease Using Cellular Automata and Nearest Neighbor Interactions