Modular design of synthetic gene circuits with biological parts and pools

Methods Mol Biol. 2015:1244:137-65. doi: 10.1007/978-1-4939-1878-2_7.

Abstract

Synthetic gene circuits can be designed in an electronic fashion by displaying their basic components-Standard Biological Parts and Pools of molecules-on the computer screen and connecting them with hypothetical wires. This procedure, achieved by our add-on for the software ProMoT, was successfully applied to bacterial circuits. Recently, we have extended this design-methodology to eukaryotic cells. Here, highly complex components such as promoters and Pools of mRNA contain hundreds of species and reactions whose calculation demands a rule-based modeling approach. We showed how to build such complex modules via the joint employment of the software BioNetGen (rule-based modeling) and ProMoT (modularization). In this chapter, we illustrate how to utilize our computational tool for synthetic biology with the in silico implementation of a simple eukaryotic gene circuit that performs the logic AND operation.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Computational Biology / methods*
  • Genes, Synthetic*
  • RNA, Messenger / metabolism*

Substances

  • RNA, Messenger