{"id":150324,"date":"2022-11-15T22:04:59","date_gmt":"2022-11-16T04:04:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/11\/synthetic-biology-circuits-can-respond-within-seconds"},"modified":"2022-11-15T22:04:59","modified_gmt":"2022-11-16T04:04:59","slug":"synthetic-biology-circuits-can-respond-within-seconds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/11\/synthetic-biology-circuits-can-respond-within-seconds","title":{"rendered":"Synthetic biology circuits can respond within seconds"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/synthetic-biology-circuits-can-respond-within-seconds.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Synthetic biology offers a way to engineer cells to perform novel functions, such as glowing with fluorescent light when they detect a certain chemical. Usually, this is done by altering cells so they express genes that can be triggered by a certain input.<\/p>\n<p>However, there is often a long lag time between an event such as detecting a molecule and the resulting output, because of the time required for <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/cells\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">cells<\/a> to transcribe and translate the necessary genes. MIT synthetic biologists have now developed an alternative approach to designing such <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/circuits\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">circuits<\/a>, which relies exclusively on fast, reversible protein-protein interactions. This means that there\u2019s no waiting for genes to be transcribed or translated into proteins, so circuits can be turned on much faster\u2014within seconds.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe now have a methodology for designing protein interactions that occur at a very fast timescale, which no one has been able to develop systematically. We\u2019re getting to the point of being able to engineer any function at timescales of a few seconds or less,\u201d says Deepak Mishra, a research associate in MIT\u2019s Department of Biological Engineering and the lead author of the new study.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Synthetic biology offers a way to engineer cells to perform novel functions, such as glowing with fluorescent light when they detect a certain chemical. Usually, this is done by altering cells so they express genes that can be triggered by a certain input. However, there is often a long lag time between an event such [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1902,3,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-150324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bioengineering","category-biological","category-chemistry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150324"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150324\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}