Synthetic biology by controller design

Abstract

Natural biological systems display complex regulation and synthetic biomolecular systems have been used to understand their natural counterparts and to parse sophisticated regulations into core design principles. At the same time, the engineering of biomolecular systems has unarguable potential to transform current and to enable new, yet-to-be-imagined, biotechnology applications. In this review, we discuss the progression of control systems design in synthetic biology, from the purpose of understanding the function of naturally occurring regulatory motifs to that of creating genetic circuits whose function is sufficiently robust for biotechnology applications.