Although classical molecular biology and genetic engineering equipped the science community with many functional proteins and possible applications, using and linking different parts together to a working network still requires highly complicated strategies. The switches established in molecular biology, for example the lac operon, are highly limited, as most of them rely on interactions including metabolites and proteins providing only one on/off-signal. Thus, it is hardly possible to build up a logic network inside a cell without interferences between different switches. Our approach is to change this by developing a new and more robust way to control E. coli cells using RNA-RNA-interaction based switches, which we call bioLOGICS.
These switches allow an easy construction of networks consisting of AND/OR circuits. The major advantage of our RNA-based units is the possiblility to easily upscale and to include parameters for tailored protein expression control.
This is a major advantage towards ribozyme and especially protein based networks. While the complexicity of protein-protein interactions may work for cells, constructing networks without just copying complete operons is hardly possible. With the small size of our bioLOGICS, ten logic units occupy the space of an average protein sequence on a plasmid. Circuits based on bioLOGICS may play a key role for gene regulation with more variations than just on/off in the future.