Recombinase-based genetic circuit optimization

Abstract

The rapid advancements of synthetic biology show promising potential in biomedical and other applications. Recently, recombinases were proposed as a tool to engineer genetic logic circuits with long-term memory in living and even mammalian cells. The technology is under active development, and the complexity of engineered genetic circuits grows continuously. However, how to minimize a genetic circuit composed of recombinase-based logic gates remain largely open. In this paper, we formulate the problem as a cubic-time assignment problem and solved by a 0/1-ILP solver to minimize DNA sequence length of genetic circuits. Experimental results show effective reduction of our optimization method, which may be crucial to enable practical realization of complex genetic circuits.