Genetic Systems Engineering

Synthetic biology is founded on the central dogma of molecular biology, which describes flow of genetic information from DNA to RNA to Protein. Using this foundation as a platform for logic synthesis, biologists have engineered genetic modules that can resemble logical functions such as a NOR gate (logical joint denial). Although a NOR gate is a universal gate (it can be used to implement any combinatorional logic circuit without the need to use any other gate type), Boolean functions lack the functional richness required to capture the finer details of molecular biology. Furthermore, sparse or poorly defined characterization of genetic modules makes creating robust genetic circuits difficult. To solve these problems, this work uses the principles of systems engineering, and introduces a framework to build reliable and robust genetic systems.