The growing field of synthetic biology allows engineers to create cells which perform novel functions, such as by altering cells to express genes that can be triggered by a specific input. However, a drawback is the long delay between an input (such as detecting a molecule of interest) and the resulting output, due to the time required for cells to transcribe and translate the necessary genes.
Now, synthetic biologists at MIT’s Department of Biological Engineering have developed an alternative approach to designing such circuits, which uses fast, reversible protein-protein interactions. This removes the need to wait while genes are transcribed or translated into proteins, cutting working times to seconds.
“We 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’re getting to the point of being able to engineer any function at timescales of a few seconds...