Echromatin: Developing a Cell-Free Platform for Electronically Controllable Gene Expression

Abstract

Conference InformationPoster presented at the 2024 Synthetic Biology: Engineering, Evolution & Design (SEED) conference in Atlanta, GA, USA. The poster abstract, presentation date, time, and list of authors can be viewed on the conference registry page here.AbstractIntegrating silicon-based electronics and biomolecules can enable a wealth of new applications in information technology and life sciences. We are building a small, automatable, electronic system analogous to chromatin-based control of cellular gene expression that can store and differentially express an array of genes. To do this, we have designed a physical system for parallel DNA monolayer generation and testing. We then characterize the densities and compositions of these monolayers and show that we can achieve cell-free transcription-translation (TXTL) activity using specifically bound DNA monolayers. Finally, we aim to determine and characterize the electronically actuated conformational changes within gene-length DNA monolayers and attempt to achieve consistently distinguishable TXTL rates through the application of different voltages. The intended application of our platform is as a “lab-on-a-chip” style bio-electronic interface for molecular computing, but we also foresee applications in molecular biology lab automation.