Complex Logic Circuit Made From Bacterial Genes 37
another random user writes "Just as electronic circuits are made from resistors, capacitors and transistors, biological circuits can be made from genes and regulatory proteins. Engineer Tae Seok Moon's dream is to design modular 'genetic parts' that can be used to build logic controllers inside microbes that will program them to make fuel, clean up pollutants, or kill infectious bacteria or cancerous cells. The circuit Moon eventually built consisted of four sensors for four different molecules that fed into three two-input AND gates. If all four molecules were present, all three AND gates turned on and the last one produced a reporter protein that fluoresced red, so that the operation of the circuit could be easily monitored."
Re:Um... (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure, but we don't know how to program life to do what we want. I'm not convinced that implementing digital logic circuits is the way to accomplish his goal, but I'm not convinced that it isn't either. This may be a dead end. Perhaps we will have a much better method later. However, this seems to be an approach that we can investigate now.