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Fluigi: Microfluidic Device Synthesis for Synthetic Biology

Published: 30 December 2014 Publication History

Abstract

One goal of synthetic biology is to design and build genetic circuits in living cells for a range of applications. Our incomplete knowledge of the effects of metabolic load and biological “crosstalk” on the host cell make it difficult to construct multilevel genetic logic circuits in a single cell, limiting the scalability of engineered biological systems. Microfluidic technologies provide reliable and scalable construction of synthetic biological systems by allowing compartmentalization of cells encoding simple genetic circuits and the spatiotemporal control of communication among these cells. This control is achieved via valves on the microfluidics chip which restrict fluid flow when activated. We describe a Computer Aided Design (CAD) framework called “Fluigi” for optimizing the layout of genetic circuits on a microfluidic chip, generating the control sequence of the associated signaling fluid valves, and simulating the behavior of the configured biological circuits. We demonstrate the capabilities of Fluigi on a set of Boolean algebraic benchmark circuits found in both synthetic biology and electrical engineering and a set of assay-based benchmark circuits. The integration of microfluidics and synthetic biology has the capability to increase the scale of engineered biological systems for applications in DNA assembly, biosensors, and screening assays for novel orthogonal genetic parts.

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    Published In

    cover image ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems
    ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems  Volume 11, Issue 3
    Special Issue on Computational Synthetic Biology and Regular Papers
    December 2014
    219 pages
    ISSN:1550-4832
    EISSN:1550-4840
    DOI:10.1145/2711453
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Publication History

    Published: 30 December 2014
    Accepted: 01 August 2014
    Revised: 01 June 2014
    Received: 01 January 2014
    Published in JETC Volume 11, Issue 3

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    Author Tags

    1. Synthetic biology
    2. genetic circuits
    3. microfluidics

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    • Clare Booth Luce Graduate Fellowship

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    • (2022)Hardware, Software, and Wetware Codesign Environment for Synthetic BiologyBioDesign Research10.34133/2022/97945102022Online publication date: Jan-2022
    • (2021)Machine learning enables design automation of microfluidic flow-focusing droplet generationNature Communications10.1038/s41467-020-20284-z12:1Online publication date: 4-Jan-2021
    • (2020)Computer-Aided Design of Microfluidic CircuitsAnnual Review of Biomedical Engineering10.1146/annurev-bioeng-082219-03335822:1(285-307)Online publication date: 4-Jun-2020
    • (2020)Domain-Specific Programming Languages for Computational Nucleic Acid SystemsACS Synthetic Biology10.1021/acssynbio.0c000509:7(1499-1513)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2020
    • (2019)3DμF - Interactive Design Environment for Continuous Flow Microfluidic DevicesScientific Reports10.1038/s41598-019-45623-z9:1Online publication date: 24-Jun-2019
    • (2018)Computer-aided design of resistance micro-fluidic circuits for 3D printingComputer-Aided Design10.1016/j.cad.2017.12.00498:C(12-23)Online publication date: 1-May-2018
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    • (2017)Scheduling and optimization of genetic logic circuits on flow-based microfluidic biochipsDesign, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE), 201710.23919/DATE.2017.7927285(1805-1810)Online publication date: Mar-2017
    • (2017)Design Automation in Synthetic BiologyCold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology10.1101/cshperspect.a0239789:4(a023978)Online publication date: 28-Feb-2017

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