bottom-up engineering of biological systems through standard bricks a modularity study on basic parts and devices自下而上通过标准砖工程生物系统模块化研究基本部件和设备.pdfVIP

Bottom-Up Engineering of Biological Systems through Standard Bricks: A Modularity Study on Basic Parts and Devices 1,2 ` 1,2 1,2 2 Lorenzo Pasotti , Nicolo Politi , Susanna Zucca , Maria Gabriella Cusella De Angelis , Paolo Magni1,2* ` ` 1 Dipartimento di Ingegneria Industriale e dell’Informazione, Universita degli Studi di Pavia, Pavia, Italy, 2 Centro di Ingegneria Tissutale, Universita degli Studi di Pavia, Pavia, Italy Abstract Background: Modularity is a crucial issue in the engineering world, as it enables engineers to achieve predictable outcomes when different components are interconnected. Synthetic Biology aims to apply key concepts of engineering to design and construct new biological systems that exhibit a predictable behaviour. Even if physical and measurement standards have been recently proposed to facilitate the assembly and characterization of biological components, real modularity is still a major research issue. The success of the bottom-up approach strictly depends on the clear definition of the limits in which biological functions can be predictable. Results: The modularity of transcription-based biological components has been investigated in several conditions. First, the activity of a set of promoters was quantified in Escherichia coli via different measurement systems (i.e., different plasmids, reporter genes, ribosome binding sites) relative to an in vivo reference promoter. Second, promoter activity variation was measured when two independent gene expression cassettes were assembled in the same system. Thir