A fundamental trait of biological systems is their capacity to perform computations. Although cells are composed of molecules and their viability relies on extracting and using energy to maintain them, they are not "just" matter and energy.
Information, and how it is processed and used, is an essential ingredient of biology. Adaptation to environmental signals requires the processing and proper output to incoming information. This is of no surprise when we consider that life is strongly tied to genetic information. Similarly, a computational picture of biological systems is at the core of important, unanswered questions on how organisms behave.
Biological systems perform computations at multiple scales and they do so in a robust way. Engineering metaphors have often been used in order to provide a rationale for modeling cellular and molecular computing networks and as the basis for their synthetic design. However, a major constraint in this mapping between electronic and wet computational circuits is the wiring problem. Although wires are identical within electronic devices, they must be different when using synthetic biology designs. Moreover, in most cases the designed molecular systems cannot be reused for other functions.
A new approximation allows us to simplify the problem by using synthetic cellular consortia where the output of the computation is distributed over multiple engineered cells. By evolving circuits in silico, we can obtain the minimal sets of Boolean units required to solve the given problem at the lowest cost using cellular consortia. Our analysis reveals that the basic set of logic units is typically non-standard. Among the most common units, the so called inverted IMPLIES (N-Implies) appears to be on
e of the most important elements along with the NOT and AND functions. Although NOR and NAND gates are widely used in electronics, evolved circuits based on combinations of these gates are rare, thus suggesting that the strategy of combining the same basic logic gates might be inappropriate in order to easily implement synthetic computational constructs. The implications for future synthetic designs, the general view of synthetic biology as a standard engineering domain, as well as potencial drawbacks are outlined.
We are exploring how to create a new technology inspired in cellular networks and how to build a general-purpose biological computer. By evolving hardware and software, we also search for robust solutions to complex problems.
The project is funded by a European Research Council Advanced Grant (ERC 2012) and the Fundación Botín.