Anyone for Cello to bring that new life into the world? NewScientist (9 April 2016) reports on the new biohacking language:
Verilog is a symbolic language that lets you specify the function of an electronic circuit in shorthand – without having to worry about the underlying hardware – and then convert it into a detailed design automatically. Voigt’s team realised they could do the same with DNA circuits.
Their system, called Cello, takes a Verilog design and converts it into a DNA wiring diagram. This is fed to a machine that generates a strand of DNA that encodes the specified function. The DNA can then be inserted into a microbe.
That sounds so cool to this old hack, but it’s necessary to realize that there’s a difference between a computer virus, and that bacteria you just hacked to be 20 times more virulent – the latter is more likely to kill you than the former.
Nature has a report:
The aim is to help people who are not skilled biologists to quickly design working biological systems, says synthetic biologist Christopher Voigt at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, who led the work. “This is the first example where we’ve literally created a programming language for cells,” he says.
In the new software — called Cello — a user first specifies the kind of cell they are using and what they want it to do: for example, sense metabolic conditions in the gut and produce a drug in response. They type in commands to explain how these inputs and outputs should be logically connected, using a computing language called Verilog that electrical engineers have long relied on to design silicon circuits. Finally, Cello translates this information to design a DNA sequence that, when put into a cell, will execute the demands.
Voigt says his team is writing user interfaces that would allow biologists to write a single program and be returned different DNA sequences for different organisms. Anyone can access Cello through a Web-based interface, or by downloading its open-source code from the online repository GitHub.
”This paper solves the problem of the automated design, construction and testing of logic circuits in living cells,” says bioengineer Herbert Sauro at the University of Washington in Seattle, who was not involved in the study. The work is published in Science.1
I haven’t actually tried it, but it sounds interesting.
