NEB: Integrated Biological and Electronic Computation at the Nanoscale

该项目是根据2020年及以后的纳米电子学竞赛授予的，得到了国家科学基金会多个董事和部门以及半导体研究公司纳米电子研究计划的支持。在过去的十年中，由于底层技术的限制，电子产品的规模已经放缓，因为人们正在接近纳米尺度，包括泄漏、功耗、光刻、互连和噪声。因此，需要从根本上为高效和高性能计算提供新的范例，以实现重要的应用，如研究复杂的生物系统。这一提议的研究目标是用一个集成了异质生物和纳米电子系统的模拟-数字混合计算平台来突破传统电子学的规模限制。将要探索的假设是，电子计算和生物计算的异质集成是可取的，因为前者提供了精度、可编程性和速度，而后者产生了高度并行和高效的处理。这些系统将利用合成生物学在仿生的阈值下电子学和活细胞中实现；它们将通过微流体和生物纳米材料相互集成。这项研究可能在计算科学、合成生物学、电气工程、纳米材料研究、传染病和生物医学等广泛领域产生广泛影响。我们对新形式的生物处理的实验将增强计算平台的广度，并为生物学如何实现稳健和高效的计算提供见解。我们的生物电路将通过用于工程生物系统的新设备和架构来推进合成生物学领域。通过用亚阈值电子学模拟生物网络，我们可以发现新的高性能电路设计。我们对生物合成和组织纳米线的研究将有助于我们理解生物系统是如何自组织的，并将在未来实现新的纳米电子学、可持续和环境友好的纳米材料合成和自我修复结构。我们将在生物医学研究中目前难以解决的问题上验证我们的计算平台，包括建模、模拟和了解新兴特性，如细菌和酵母的抗生素耐药性是如何从大规模网络中产生的。这一计算平台将为假说驱动的生物医学研究实现前所未有的大规模生物系统建模。该项目还旨在推进这项研究所涉及的高度跨学科学科的教育和推广工作。本项目将开设一门新课程--《分子电路工程》，为本科生和研究生提供分子计算和实验技术方面的培训。该团队还将监督国际基因工程机器(IGEM)竞赛的学生提供动手实验培训。一个关键的优先事项是与麻省理工学院和麻省理工学院综合合成生物学中心合作，通过周六工程丰富和发现学院、麻省理工学院暑期研究计划和女性工程师协会，积极招募代表性不足的少数族裔和女性进入计算、合成生物学和生物启发的电子研究。

This project is awarded under the Nanoelectronics for 2020 and Beyond competition, with support by multiple Directorates and Divisions at the National Science Foundation as well as by the Nanoelectronics Research Initiative of the Semiconductor Research Corporation. In the last decade, the scaling of electronics has slowed due to limitations in underlying technologies as nanoscale dimensions are approached, including leakage, power dissipation, lithography, interconnect, and noise. Thus, fundamentally new paradigms for efficient and high-performance computation are needed to enable important applications such as studying complex biological systems. The research objective of this proposal is to breakthrough the scaling limits of conventional electronics with a hybrid analog-digital computational platform that integrates heterogeneous biological and nanoelectronic systems. The hypothesis that will be explored is that heterogeneous integration of electronic computation and biological computation is desirable since the former contributes precision, programmability, and speed while the latter yields highly parallel and efficient processing. These systems will be implemented in bio-inspired subthreshold electronics and living cells using synthetic biology; they shall be integrated with each other via microfluidics and biological nanomaterials.This research has the potential to have broad impacts on a wide range of fields including computational science, synthetic biology, electrical engineering, nanomaterials research, infectious diseases, and biomedical science. Our experiments with novel forms of biological processing will enhance the breadth of computational platforms and provide insights into how biology achieves robust and efficient computation. Our biological circuits will advance the field of synthetic biology via new devices and architectures for engineering biological systems. By mimicking biological networks with subthreshold electronics, we can discover new high-performance electrical circuit designs. Our research into biologically synthesized and organized nanowires will inform our understanding of how biological systems are self-organized and shall enable new nanoelectronics, sustainable and environmentally friendly nanomaterial synthesis, and self-healing structures in the future. We will validate our computational platform on currently intractable problems in biomedical research, including modeling, simulating, and understanding how emergent properties, such as antibiotic resistance in bacteria and yeast, arise from large-scale networks. This computational platform will enable the unprecedented modeling of large-scale biological systems for hypothesis-driven biomedical research. This project also aims to advance education and outreach efforts in the highly interdisciplinary disciplines involved in this research. This project shall create a new course, "Molecular Circuits Engineering", to train undergraduates and graduates in both computational and experimental techniques for molecular computation. The team will also supervise students in the International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) competition to provide hands-on experimental training. A key priority is to work with MIT and the MIT Center for Integrative Synthetic Biology to actively recruit under-represented minorities and women into computational, synthetic biology, and bio-inspired electronics research via the Saturday Engineering Enrichment and Discovery Academy, the MIT Summer Research Program, and the Society of Women Engineers.