Analysis, Design and Prototyping of Biomolecular Circuits

Richard M. Murray, Ph.D.
Professor
Control and Dynamical Systems
California Institute of Technology

Advances over the past decade have given biological engineers new insights into the role of genetic circuits in nature and the design of biomolecular circuits to implement biological operations in vitro and in vivo.  In this talk I will discuss the use of concepts from systems and control engineering as applied to the analysis and design of biological circuits.  After a brief survey of relevant concepts from synthetic  biology,  I  will  present  some  recent  results  that  combine  modeling, analysis,  design  and  experimental  implementation  of  engineered  biological circuits.  These results include the the use of biomolecular "breadboards" for prototyping  and  debugging  engineered  biomolecular  circuits,  and  the implementation of circuits for regulation of gene expression and biomolecular event detection.  Using these results as examples, I will discuss some of the open problems and research challenges in synthetic biology.

Richard  M.  Murray  received  the  B.S.  degree  in  Electrical  Engineering  from California Institute of Technology in 1985 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1988 and 1991, respectively.  He is currently the Thomas E. and Doris Everhart Professor of Control & Dynamical Systems and Bioengineering at Caltech. Murray's research is in the application of feedback and control to networked systems, with applications in biology and autonomy. Current projects include verification and validation of distributed embedded systems, analysis of insect flight control systems, and biological circuit design.