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:List of applications sounds like funding BS ... (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't see Moon's research conferring much of an advantage in industrial, remediation, or medical uses; those are best off with a single control mechanism. Most of the decision making process for those situations will continue to be most efficient if it is done outside of the bacteria. For an analogy: a factory could have four sensors hooked up to four smartphones to tell it how much it has in stock of four diffeerent parts and automatically order more when the levels get too low. Or instead a factory could have a sensor and a smart phone phone attached to each and every individual part to do that job. Each part would have to carry that sensor and phone which would inflate its cost without contributing to its final use. Ditto for distributing the control architecture to the bacteria.
I think the use for Moon's control architecture will be in research; the rest (like you said) will be hype.