Inferring Closed-Loop Responses from Open-Loop Characteristics for a Family of Synthetic Transcriptional Feedback Systems

Synthetic biology seeks to build biological systems from the bottom up: to design and construct complex systems from simple parts. Essential to the design process is the ability to predict the response of a system by measuring the behavior of its parts, even as the complexity of the system is scaled up. Our project is designed so that, by measuring the behavior of relatively simple systems called ‘open loops', we are able to predict the response of more complex systems called ‘closed loops’. If these predictions match the observed responses, it would rigorously demonstrate that we can indeed go from parts to systems.