Resource Sensor Design for Quantifying Resource Competition in Genetic Circuits

Abstract

© 2018 IEEE. Sharing of cellular resources in genetic circuits negatively affects performance and often leads to unpredictable behavior. Measuring key metrics from experimental data that quantify resource sharing and its effect on a system's output would be highly useful. In this paper, we propose two metrics, Q and S, representing the quantity of resources used by a genetic circuit module and the sensitivity of the output of a module to resource disturbances, respectively. Together, Q and S may be used to estimate the change in the output of a module in response to the disturbances in the availability of resources. We cast the problem of finding these metrics as a parameter estimation problem and outline a simple procedure to estimate these metrics from data. Knowledge of Q and S for a circuit module enables prediction of the effects of resource sharing and allows for resource-aware design of genetic circuits.