From Electric Circuits to Chemical Networks
This work offers a novel design methodology for synthetic biologists to leverage established electronic circuit principles for engineering biochemical networks, potentially accelerating the development of complex synthetic biological systems.
The authors developed a systematic method to convert linear electric circuits into chemical reaction networks with equivalent functionality, enabling the use of analog electronics designs for synthetic biology. The conversion preserves the dynamical behavior, providing a bridge between electrical engineering and biochemical network design.
Electric circuits manipulate electric charge and magnetic flux via a small set of discrete components to implement useful functionality over continuous time-varying signals represented by currents and voltages. Much of the same functionality is useful to biological organisms, where it is implemented by a completely different set of discrete components (typically proteins) and signal representations (typically via concentrations). We describe how to take a linear electric circuit and systematically convert it to a chemical reaction network of the same functionality, as a dynamical system. Both the structure and the components of the electric circuit are dissolved in the process, but the resulting chemical network is intelligible. This approach provides access to a large library of well-studied devices, from analog electronics, whose chemical network realization can be compared to natural biochemical networks, or used to engineer synthetic biochemical networks.