Shared resources and biomolecular feedback considerations for engineering of bacterial cells with improved robustness and performance
In this talk I will give an overview of some of our research activities in the "Control Engineering Synthetic Biology" group, where we focus our efforts on developing foundational forward-engineering methods to mathematically model, control, and experimentally implement synthetic gene circuits and cellular systems that aim at increasing the robustness, performance, and genetic stability of engineered cells. During the talk, I will propose some approaches to answer the following core questions in systems and synthetic biology :
– How can we design taking into account shared resources to improve growth rates, genetic stability and robustness of synthetic biology systems ?
– How can we improve the dynamic performance (e.g. transient and response time) of synthetic biology systems ?
– How can we use cellular resources more efficiently to simultaneously improve growth rates and production yields ?
In particular, I will present some recent work on the development of various de novo biomolecular feedback mechanisms in bacterial cells (mainly E. coli) that we use to answer the above questions. Our envisioned target applications for these novel designs include cell-based medicine, more efficient biosynthesis, and scale-up in synthetic biology and biotechnology.