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Research

Biological systems - including the simplest cells - exhibit a broad range of functions to thrive in their environment. Research in the Imperial College Centre for Synthetic Biology is focused on the possibility of engineering the underlying biochemical processes to solve many of the challenges facing society, from healthcare to sustainable energy. In particular, we model, analyse, design and build biological and biochemical systems in living cells and/or in cell extracts, both exploring and enhancing the engineering potential of biology.

As part of our research we develop novel methods to accelerate the celebrated Design-Build-Test-Learn synthetic biology cycle. As such research in the Centre for Synthetic Biology highly multi- and interdisciplinary covering computational modelling and machine learning approaches; automated platform development and genetic circuit engineering ; multi-cellular and multi-organismal interactions, including gene drive and genome engineering; metabolic engineering; in vitro/cell-free synthetic biology; engineered phages and directed evolution; and biomimetics, biomaterials and biological engineering.

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@inproceedings{Sootla:2015:10.1109/ACC.2015.7171815,
author = {Sootla, A and Oyarzun, DA and Angeli, D and Stan, GB},
doi = {10.1109/ACC.2015.7171815},
pages = {3138--3143},
publisher = {IEEE},
title = {Shaping Pulses to Control Bi-Stable Biological Systems},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ACC.2015.7171815},
year = {2015}
}

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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - In this paper, we present a framework for shaping pulses to control biological systems, and specifically systems in synthetic biology. By shaping we mean computing the magnitude and the length of a pulse, application of which results in reaching the desired control objective. Hence the control signals have only two parameters, which makes these signals amenable to wetlab implementations. We focus on the problem of switching between steady states in a bistable system. We show how to estimate the set of the switching pulses, if the trajectories of the controlled system can be bounded from above and below by the trajectories of monotone systems. We then generalise this result to systems with parametric uncertainty under some mild assumptions on the set of admissible parameters, thus providing some robustness guarantees. We illustrate the results on some example genetic circuits.
AU  - Sootla,A
AU  - Oyarzun,DA
AU  - Angeli,D
AU  - Stan,GB
DO  - 10.1109/ACC.2015.7171815
EP  - 3143
PB  - IEEE
PY  - 2015///
SP  - 3138
TI  - Shaping Pulses to Control Bi-Stable Biological Systems
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ACC.2015.7171815
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/28660
ER  -

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