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Lightening the load in synthetic biology

Nature Biotechnology volume 32, pages 1198–1200 (2014)Cite this article

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A new biological device known as a 'load driver' improves the performance of synthetic circuits by insulating genetic parts from each other.

Synthetic biologists dream of designing genetic circuits as easily as electrical engineers design electronic circuits. Yet, unlike microchips, genetic parts such as transcription factors and promoters rarely behave as intended when they are interconnected. Predictable performance is undermined by the nature of the cellular environment, including the genetic context of sequences encoding parts, the unanticipated effects of parts on each other and their nonspecific interactions with other molecules in the cell. These effects are compounded as the size of a circuit increases, preventing the construction of circuits with more than a handful of components despite the availability of large libraries of parts. In this issue, Mishra et al.1 tackle one aspect of the problem with a new part, called a load driver, that effectively insulates an upstream part from the downstream elements to which it is connected. This approach marks an important step toward the goal of being able to connect parts reliably in complex circuits.

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Figure 1: Using buffers in electronics and synthetic biology.

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  1. Eric Klavins is at the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA.,

    Eric Klavins

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  1. Eric Klavins
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Correspondence to Eric Klavins.

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The author declares no competing financial interests.

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Klavins, E. Lightening the load in synthetic biology. Nat Biotechnol 32, 1198–1200 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.3089

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