First there were mechanical gears, then transistors, and now there are living cells. A team of Stanford University made a transistor from DNA. That biological transistor is called transcriptor.
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When Charles Babbage prototyped the first computing machine in the 19th century, he imagined using mechanical gears and latches to control information. ENIAC, the first modern computer developed in the 1940s, used vacuum tubes and electricity. Today, computers use transistors made from highly engineered semiconducting materials to carry out their logical operations.
And now a team of Stanford University bioengineers has taken computing beyond mechanics and electronics into the living realm of biology. In a paper published March 28 in Science, the team details a biological transistor made from genetic material. DNA and RNA. in place of gears or electrons. The team calls its biological transistor the "transcriptor."
"Transcriptors are the key component behind amplifying genetic logic - akin to the transistor and electronics," said Jerome Bonnet, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar in bioengineering and the paper's lead author.
In electronics, a transistor controls the flow of electrons along a circuit. In biologics, a transcriptor controls the flow of a specific protein, RNA polymerase, as it travels along a strand of DNA. Stanford's scientist repurposed a group of natural proteins integrases to achieve digital control over the flow of RNA polymerase along DNA. That in turn make genetic logic possible.
Using transcriptors, the team has created logic gates that can derive true-false answers to virtually any biochemical question that might be posed within a cell. They refer to their transcriptor-based logic gates as Boolean Integrase Logic or BIL gates. Transcriptor-based gates are a component of a biological computer that could operate within individual living cells.
"Biological computers can be used to study and reprogram living systems, monitor environments and improve cellular therapeutics," said Drew Endy, PhD, assistant professor of bioengineering and the paper's senior author.
To bring the age of the biological computer to a much speedier reality, Endy and his team have contributed all of BIL gates to the public domain so that others can immediately harness and improve upon the tools. ■