Enabling biocircuits: New device could make large biological circuits practical

Researchers have made great progress in recent years in the design and creation of biological circuits -- systems that, like electronic circuits, can take a number of different inputs and deliver a particular kind of output.

But while individual components of such biological circuits can have precise and predictable responses, those outcomes become less predictable as more such elements are combined.

A team of researchers at MIT has now come up with a way of greatly reducing that unpredictability, introducing a device that could ultimately allow such circuits to behave nearly as predictably as their electronic counterparts. The findings are published this week in the journal Nature Biotechnology. The lead author of the paper is Deepak Mishra, an MIT graduate student in biological engineering.

There are many potential uses for such synthetic biological circuits, Del Vecchio and Weiss explain. "One specific one we're working on is biosensing -- cells that can detect specific molecules in the environment and produce a specific output in response," Del Vecchio says. One example: cells that could detect markers that indicate the presence of cancer cells, and then trigger the release of molecules targeted to kill those cells.

It is important for such circuits to be able to discriminate accurately between cancerous and noncancerous cells, so they don't unleash their killing power in the wrong places, Weiss says. To do that, robust information-processing circuits created from biological elements within a cell become "highly critical," Weiss says.