title: Recognizing and engineering digital-like logic gates and switches in gene regulatory networks.
abstract: A central aim of synthetic biology is to build organisms that can perform useful activities in response to specified conditions. The digital computing paradigm which has proved so successful in electrical engineering is being mapped to synthetic biological systems to allow them to make such decisions. However, stochastic molecular processes have graded input-output functions, thus, bioengineers must select those with desirable characteristics and refine their transfer functions to build logic gates with digital-like switching behaviour. Recent efforts in genome mining and the development of programmable RNA-based switches, especially CRISPRi, have greatly increased the number of parts available to synthetic biologists. Improvements to the digital characteristics of these parts are required to enable robust predictable design of deeply layered logic circuits.
authors.affiliation: Department of Life Sciences, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, UK; School of Biological Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH9 3FF, UK.
authors.forename: Robert W
authors.initials: RW
authors.lastname: Bradley
authors.affiliation: Department of Life Sciences, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, UK. Electronic address: m.buck@imperial.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Martin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Buck
authors.affiliation: School of Biological Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH9 3FF, UK; Centre for Synthetic and Systems Biology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH9 3FF, UK. Electronic address: baojun.wang@ed.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Baojun
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Wang
mesh_terms: D001419:Bacteria / Q000235:genetics; D064113:CRISPR-Cas Systems / Q000235:genetics; D045744:Cell Line, Tumor; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D004268:DNA-Binding Proteins / Q000235:genetics; D053263:Gene Regulatory Networks / Q000235:genetics*; D006367:HeLa Cells; D006801:Humans; D035683:MicroRNAs / Q000235:genetics; D058615:Synthetic Biology / Q000379:methods*
chemical_list: D004268:DNA-Binding Proteins; D035683:MicroRNAs