Metaverse Applications in Biotechnology Era

Abstract

There is a great transformation in information technologies that has been going on for the last 20 years. This digital transformation has affected many areas of life. Its impact in the field of life sciences gave a great impetus to the development of ‘biotechnological-compatible with life’ products and solutions by better understanding the ‘language of life’ and improving and reproducing the information of living things or living things in nature with technology. Steve Jobs said in 2010, ‘The greatest innovations of the twenty-first century will emerge at the intersection of biology and technology, a new era is beginning’. He stated that the age of biotechnology has begun with these words. The most important developments in the field of biotechnology gained momentum with the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA, which we can call the ‘alphabet’ of life. In the period between 1953 and 2003, when this breakthrough was made and when the Human Genome Project was announced, technological advances made it possible to sequence all the letters in DNA. But it was understood that there was still a long way to go to understand complex living structures. Addition to genome studies, epigenome studies investigating the effects of genes and the environment, proteome studies examining the proteins that are the building blocks of life, microbiome studies investigating the microorganisms with which they share the human body, and metabolome studies examining the formation of all metabolism. The biological data in all these layers formed a great deal of biological data—or Omic data. The field of bioinformatics makes analysis of information and makes them more understandable. Examining the ‘Omic Universe’ created by all this Omic data will create a more realistic link between the ‘Meta-Universe’ of the future and real life. In the digital version of life, more ‘vital applications with more resemblance to the real version’—such as avatars, learning and even thinking machines that are closer to reality—will be possible with a very good understanding of the language of real life. This technological transformation will come true with the combination of the biotechnology platform and the information technology platform. © 2023 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.