Contextualizing biomolecular circuit models for synthetic biology
Synthetic biology is the bottom-up engineering of new molecular functionality inside a biological cell. Although it aims at a quantitative and compositional approach, most of today’s implementations of synthetic circuits are based on inefficient trial-and-error runs. This approach to circuit design does not scale well with circuit complexity and is against the basic paradigm of synthetic biology. This unsatisfactory state of affairs is partly due to the lack of the right computational methodology that can support the quantitative characterization of circuits and their significant context dependency, i.e. their change in behavior upon interactions with the host machinery and with other circuit elements.
CONSYN will contribute computational methodology to overcome the trial-and-error approach and to ultimately turn synthetic circuit design into a rational bottom-up process that heavily relies on computational analysis before any actual biomolecular implementation is considered.
