Monday, October 15, 2012

Progress in Characterization...

Normally I wouldn't share a significant unpublished result on this blog, but last week we showed this off at a program meeting, so the cat is already mostly out of the bag.  To make a long story short, all of the hard work we've been doing on characterization of devices in synthetic biology is beginning to pay off.  I've talked about this a couple of times before, on the struggle to make good models of biological devices and on the new characterization protocols we developed so that we could study devices quickly and precisely.

Now, it seems to all be coming together nicely, and we've gotten a few beautiful results like this:
I'm not going to try to explain it all here (well, unless somebody actually asks for details in the comments), but the important things to understand are this:

  1. The circles are our predictions, and the crosses are the experimental data
  2. The colored areas we have confidence to predict in, the grey areas we don't
  3. Our predictions are really, really close to the actual behavior.

That's all I'll say for the moment, but look for a publication will full details appearing Real Soon Now... and I'm damned excited, because if the future work keeps going in the direction these results indicate, it opens the door for massively more complex biological systems and justifies the whole design tools thrust that we've been making at BBN...

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