The circuit is designed to act as the controller in
synthetic bacteria that monitor and modify their environment
By force of habit we tend to assume computers are made of
silicon, but there is actually no necessary connection between the machine and
the material. All that an engineer needs to do to make a computer is to find a
way to build logic gates — the elementary building blocks of digital computers
— in whatever material is handy.
So logic gates could theoretically be made of pipes of
water, channels for billiard balls or even mazes for soldier crabs.
By comparison Tae Seok Moon’s ambition, which is to build
logic gates out of genes, seems eminently practical. As a postdoctoral fellow
in the lab of Christopher Voigt, PhD, a synthetic biologist at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, he recently made the largest gene (or genetic) circuit
yet reported.