Biomolecular Control Systems for Living Cells

Abstract

One of the key approaches for controlling living cells involves genetically engineering biological circuits into these cells that function as dynamic bimolecular control systems that interact with the cell’s native processes and regulates their behavior in desirable ways. The cellular environment presents many challenges for such synthetic genetic controllers, including uncertain and changing components and interactions, molecular noise, cross-talk, burden, etc. These challenges necessitate the development of novel control theories and tools specifically aimed at overcoming these difficulties and enabling the successful design and implementation of biomolecular control systems in the unique cellular environment. This presentation describes some of these emerging theoretic tools and some recent successful biomolecular control systems that were enabled by them.