EMT: Toward Large Scale Integrated Nucleic Acid Circuits

“体内的生化反应是由精心设计的控制电路调节的，这些控制电路根据内部和外部信号调节它们的活性。 RNA世界假说认为，这种复杂的生物化学组织可以单独用核酸来实现，事实上，DNA和RNA已经被证明为工程分子结构和设备提供了多功能的构建材料，包括催化和逻辑控制元件以及小电路。 生物化学电路的设计可能在生物工程中发挥与电路设计在机电设备工程中所发挥的作用一样大的作用，从而推动了构建用于数字和模拟任务的大型复杂核酸门电路的方法的发展。 在这个项目中，研究人员将把以前开发的核酸电路组件整合到一个统一的设计框架中，开发改进的电路组件，构建越来越复杂的电路，并开发一个编译器，该编译器采用（模拟或数字）电路功能的抽象规范，并使用自动设计的DNA分子产生生化实现。 示例电路包括放大器、振荡器、锁存存储器、显示混沌动力学的化学Rossler吸引子以及用于二进制加法的数字电路。"

"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 ordigital) 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."