background: polychlorinated biphenyls (pcbs) are synthetic aromatic compounds containing two benzene rings with one to ten chlorine atoms. there are concerns about the health risks of these compounds in the environment due to their toxicity, persistence, and biological accumulation. pcbs wastes must be treated before being discharged to the environment because they will pollute the water, soil,...

By using tools from synthetic biology, sophisticated genetic devices can be assembled to reprogram mammalian cell activities. Here, we demonstrate that a self-adjusting synthetic gene circuit can be designed to sense and reverse the insulin-resistance syndrome in different mouse models. By functionally rewiring the mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) signalling pathway to produce MAPK-media...

We present the assembly of gene brushes by means of a photolithographic approach that allows us to control the density of end-immobilized linear double-stranded DNA polymers coding for entire genes. For 2 kbp DNAs, the mean distance varies from 300 nm, where DNAs are dilute and assume relaxed conformations, down to 30 nm, where steric repulsion at dense packing forces stretching out. We investi...

Synthetic nonionic surfactant vesicles (niosomes) are a colloidal system with closed bilayer structures, displaying distinct advantages in stability and cost compared with liposomes. In this article, polysorbate cationic niosomes (PCNs) were developed as gene carriers. The PCNs comprised nonionic surfactants (i.e., polysorbates) and a cationic cholesterol, and were synthesized using a film hydr...

Synthetic biology, the science of engineering complex biological systems with novel functions, is increasingly fascinating researchers across disciplines who gather to design functional biological assemblies in a rational and systematic manner. Although initial success stories were based on reprogramming prokaryotic and lower eukaryotic cells, the design of synthetic mammalian gene circuits is ...

Vector development is one of the most important challenges facing the successful use of genes for treatment of diseases. Although chemically produced vectors offer distinct advantages over biological systems such as viruses, there are still some hurdles that have to be overcome before synthetic gene delivery vectors can be successfully implemented. This brief review discusses the biological bar...

An efficient computational algorithm is developed to design microRNA-based synthetic cell classifiers and to optimize their performance.

De novo computational design of synthetic gene circuits that achieve well-defined target functions is a hard task. Existing, brute-force approaches run optimization algorithms on the structure and on the kinetic parameter values of the network. However, more direct rational methods for automatic circuit design are lacking. Focusing on digital synthetic gene circuits, we developed a methodology ...

Synthetic circuits offer great promise for generating insights into nature's underlying design principles or forward engineering novel biotechnology applications. However, construction of these circuits is not straightforward. Synthetic circuits generally consist of components optimized to function in their natural context, not in the context of the synthetic circuit. Combining mathematical mod...