Ribocomputing devices for sophisticated in vivo logic computation
Synthetic biology aims to create functional devices, systems, and organisms with novel and useful functions taking advantage of engineering principles applied to biology. Despite great progress over the last decade, an underlying problem in synthetic biology rema...
| Main Authors: | , , , , , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | en_US |
| Published: |
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
2017
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/109202 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5560-8246 |
| Summary: | Synthetic biology aims to create functional devices, systems, and
organisms with novel and useful functions taking advantage of
engineering principles applied to biology. Despite great
progress over the last decade, an underlying problem in synthetic biology remains the limited number of high-performance, modular,
composable parts. A potential route to solve parts bottleneck
problem in synthetic biology utilizes the programmability of
nucleic acids inspired by molecular programming approaches that
have demonstrated complex biomolecular circuits evaluating logic
expressions in test tubes.Using a library of de-novo-designed
toehold switches with orthogonality and modular composability,
we demonstrate how toehold switches can be incorporated into
decision-making RNA networks termed ribocomputing devices to
rapidly evaluate complex logic in living cells. We have
successfully demonstrated a 4-input AND gate, a 6-input OR gate,
and a 12-input expression in disjunctive normal form in
E. coli. The compact encoding of ribocomputing system using a library of
modular parts is amenable to aggressive scale-up towards
complex control of in vivo circuitry towards autonomous behaviors and biomedical applications. |
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