In Vitro Transcriptional Circuits for Feedback Control
Speaker: Elisa Franco (Caltech)

Abstract
Building and designing biological components is nowadays one of the most challenging scientific tasks. The objective is that of having pools of known biological modules that can be easily assembled to accomplish the desired functions: the application of general engineering principles is crucial in this context. This talk focuses on in vitro DNA transcriptional circuits, which are a powerful tool for the design of simplified but well engineered biological devices. In particular, the design, modeling and realization of synthetic in vitro circuits that aim at regulating the rate of mRNA transcription are described. The developed mathematical models consist of ODEs derived from the mass action laws and Michaelis-Menten kinetics involving all the present chemical species. The DNA strands were accordingly designed, following thermodynamics principles and minimizing unwanted interactions. Preliminary experimental results on one of the circuits show its ability to perform the expected task, by matching at steady state the transcription rates of two DNA templates.