Analysing control-theoretic properties of nonlinear synthetic biology circuits

Abstract

Synthetic biology is a recent area of biological engineering, whose aim is to provide cells with novel functionalities. A number of important results regarding the development of control circuits in synthetic biology have been achieved during the last decade. A differential geometry approach can be used for the analysis of said systems, which are often nonlinear. Here we demonstrate the application of such tools to analyse the structural identifiability, observability, accessibility, and controllability of several biomolecular systems. We focus on a set of synthetic circuits of current interest, which can perform several tasks, both in open loop and closed loop settings. We analyse their properties with our own methods and tools; further, we describe a new open-source implementation of the techniques.