Bioengineered Cooperative Assembly (IMAGE)

Rice University

Bioengineered Cooperative Assembly

Caption

Synthetic biologists designed a system for engineering cells that respond digitally to analog signals. Cells are pre-programmed to produce transcriptional protein components (top left) in proportion to the strength of an incoming signal. Upon reaching a critical concentration, components self-assemble (top right) into a protein complex that initiates transcription of a pre-programmed target gene. The more modules a self-assembled transcription complex contains (bottom, left to right), the more sharply it responds to the critical threshold.

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Rice University

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