title: Control theory meets synthetic biology.
abstract: The past several years have witnessed an increased presence of control theoretic concepts in synthetic biology. This review presents an organized summary of how these control design concepts have been applied to tackle a variety of problems faced when building synthetic biomolecular circuits in living cells. In particular, we describe success stories that demonstrate how simple or more elaborate control design methods can be used to make the behaviour of synthetic genetic circuits within a single cell or across a cell population more reliable, predictable and robust to perturbations. The description especially highlights technical challenges that uniquely arise from the need to implement control designs within a new hardware setting, along with implemented or proposed solutions. Some engineering solutions employing complex feedback control schemes are also described, which, however, still require a deeper theoretical analysis of stability, performance and robustness properties. Overall, this paper should help synthetic biologists become familiar with feedback control concepts as they can be used in their application area. At the same time, it should provide some domain knowledge to control theorists who wish to enter the rising and exciting field of synthetic biology.
authors.affiliation: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA Synthetic Biology Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA ddv@mit.edu.
authors.forename: Domitilla
authors.identifier: 0000-0001-6472-8576
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Del Vecchio
authors.affiliation: Department of Biological Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA.
authors.forename: Aaron J
authors.identifier: 0000-0003-0535-517X
authors.initials: AJ
authors.lastname: Dy
authors.affiliation: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
authors.forename: Yili
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-1097-0401
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Qian
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D058615:Synthetic Biology / Q000379:methods* / Q000639:trends
keywords: control theory; feedback; gene regulation; genetic circuits; robustness; synthetic biology