Biological engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge have developed a language that can be used to program DNA-encoded circuits to give new functions to cells, according to a new article published in the journal Science.
This new system was inspired by a language commonly used to code computer chips. The researchers used computer elements such as logic gates and sensors to encode new functions in the DNA of bacterial cells.
"It is literally a programming language for bacteria," Christopher Voigt, PhD, an MIT professor of biological engineering, told the MIT News. "You use a text-based language, just like you're programming a computer. Then you take that text and you compile it and it turns it into a DNA sequence that you put into the cell, and the circuit runs inside the cell."
Using the computer language, researchers created 60 programming circuits with different functions. A good portion of the circuits were able to measure one or more environmental conditions such as oxygen levels or glucose concentration. The circuits were also able to respond to their particular environments accordingly.
The programming language is currently optimized to work with E. coli bacteria, but researchers hope to expand the language to suit other bacterial strains.
Similar programming languages may also be used in the future to encode bacteria cells to produce cancer drugs after detecting a tumor.
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