Analysing control-theoretic properties of nonlinear synthetic biology circuits

TL;DR

This paper applies differential geometry tools to analyze control-theoretic properties of nonlinear synthetic biology circuits, providing insights into their structural properties and introducing an open-source implementation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of differential geometry to synthetic biology control circuits and provides an open-source tool for such analysis.

Findings

Analysis of structural identifiability, observability, accessibility, and controllability of synthetic circuits

Application of geometric methods to current synthetic biology systems

Development of an open-source software for control-theoretic analysis

Abstract

Synthetic biology is a recent area of biological engineering, whose aim is to provide cells with novel functionalities. A number of important results regarding the development of control circuits in synthetic biology have been achieved during the last decade. A differential geometry approach can be used for the analysis of said systems, which are often nonlinear. Here we demonstrate the application of such tools to analyse the structural identifiability, observability, accessibility, and controllability of several biomolecular systems. We focus on a set of synthetic circuits of current interest, which can perform several tasks, both in open loop and closed loop settings. We analyse their properties with our own methods and tools; further, we describe a new open-source implementation of the techniques.