"Biochemical reactions in vivo are regulated by elaborate control circuits that modulate their activity in response to internal and external signals. The RNA world hypothesis suggests that such sophisticated biochemical organization can be achieved with nucleic acids alone, and indeed DNA and RNA have been shown to provide a versatile construction material for engineering molecular structures and devices, including catalytic and logical control elements as well as small circuits. The design of biochemical circuits is likely to play as large a role in biological engineering as the design of electrical circuits has played in the engineering of electro-mechanical devices, motivating the development of methods to construct large and complex circuits of nucleic acid gates for digital and analog tasks.
In this project, the investigators will integrate previously developed nucleic acid circuit components into a unifying design framework, develop improved circuit components, construct circuits of increasing complexity, and develop a compiler that takes an abstract specification of (analog or digital) circuit function and produces a biochemical implementation using automatically-designed DNA molecules. Example circuits include amplifiers, oscillators, latch memories, a chemical Rossler attractor displaying chaotic dynamics, and a digital circuit for binary addition."
