From vitro to vivo: Fully automated design of synthetic RNA circuits in living cells
(Phys.org)—Synthetic biology combines science and engineering in the pursuit of two general goals: to design and construct new biological parts, devices, and systems not found in nature; and redesign existing, natural biological systems for useful purposes. For synthetic biologists a key goal is to use RNA to automatically engineer synthetic sequences that encode functional RNA sequences in living cells. While earlier RNA design attempts have mostly been developed in vitro or needed fragments of natural sequences to be viable, scientists at Institut de biologie systémique et synthétique in France have recently developed a fully automated design methodology and experimental validation of synthetic RNA interaction circuits working in a cellular environment. Their results demonstrate that engineering interacting RNAs with allosteric behavior in living cells can be accomplished using a first-principles computation.