NICOP - gurable Biocomputing Circuits (rCBC)
Abstract
Synthetic biology aims at redesigning living organisms to improve their abilities oracquire new capacities. Any response of a biological system, whether it is natural orsynthetic, can ultimately be understood in terms of a computation. The possibility ofbuilding general-purpose biologically based computing systems has advanced recently.The progress in synthetic biology has provided examples of scenarios allowing complexfunctional constructs built to sense different inputs and to produce biologically relevantoutputs. However, synthetic biology is still far from producing flexible, programmable,scalable and predictable engineered constructs able to perform complex computations.The main problem has arisen from the fact that, in contrast to electronic designs (amajor source of inspiration) where wires have identical nature, in a cell-based systemeach wire would correspond to a different molecular entity. This condition makescircuits too complex, encountering limitations due to metabolic burdens and difficult toreuse. In a joint effort between theoretical and experimental studies, we have addressedthis challenge by establishing biological circuits with Distributed Computation capacityand spatial segregation (Regot et al., 2011; Macia et al., 2016). This approach hasopened the possibility to develop a novel method to process information by properlydesign general purpose, LEGO-like multicellular systems able to partially avoid wiringlimitation. Here, we propose to explore the limits of this type of circuits byimplementing re-programmable cellular circuits to modify biological computing inresponse to changing needs or scenarios. The implementation of such designs shoulddemonstrate that this approach to biological computation is scalable, allowsconstructing reprogrammable cell-based computing machines and breaks all currentlimitations concerning circuit complexity.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Jul 10, 2018
- Source ID
- N629091812065
Entities
People
- Francesc Posas
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- Pompeu Fabra University
- United States Navy