Theory-Based Engineering of Biomolecular Circuits in Living Cells

This is a joint project between MIT, Boston University, Caltech and Rutgers. This page primarily describes the work done in Richard Murray's group.

Current participants: TBD

Collaborators: Domitilla Del Vecchio (MIT) Jim Collins (BU) Eduardo Sontag (Rutgers) Past participants:

Overview

The objective of this research is to establish a data-driven theoretical framework based on mathematics to enable the robust design of interacting biomolecular circuits in living cells that perform complex decision making. Microbiology as a platform has substantial advantages with respect to human-made hardware, including size, power, and high sensitivity/selectivity. While the latest advances in synthetic biology have rendered the creation of simple functional circuits in microbes possible, our ability of composing circuits that behave as expected is still missing. This hinders the possibility of designing robust complex decision making, including recognition and classification of chemical signatures. Overcoming this bottleneck goes beyond the engineering of new parts or new assembly methods. By contrast, it requires a deep understanding of the dynamical interactions among synthetic modules and the cell machinery, a particularly hard task since dynamics are nonlinear, stochastic, and involve multiple scales of resolution both in time and space.

Publications

None to date.

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Agency: Air Force Office of Scientific Research Grant number:

Start date: 1 Oct 2013 End date: 30 Sep 2018

Support: ~2 graduate students + supplies Reporting: annual reports due in June