Design of Asynchronous Genetic Circuits
Chris J. Myers
University of Colorado Boulder
Chris J. Myers received a BS in EE and Chinese history from Caltech, and MSEE and PhD degrees from Stanford. Before becoming Chair of ECEE at CU Boulder in 2020, he was a professor and associate chair in ECE at the University of Utah. Myers is the author of over 200 technical papers and the textbooks Asynchronous Circuit Design and Engineering Genetic Circuits. He is also a co-inventor on four patents. His research interests include asynchronous design, formal verification, and genetic circuit design. Myers received an NSF Fellowship in 1991, an NSF CAREER award in 1996, best paper awards at the 1999 and 2007 Symposiums on Asynchronous Circuits and Systems, and is a fellow of the IEEE. He is a leader in the development of standards for systems and synthetic biology. In particular, he has served as an editor for the SBML standard, is the chair of the steering committee for the SBOL standard and is the past chair of the COMBINE coordination board.
Abstract:
Researchers are now able to engineer synthetic genetic circuits for a range of applications in the environmental, medical, and energy domains. Crucial to the success of these efforts is the development of methods and tools for genetic design automation (GDA). While inspiration can be drawn from experiences with electronic design automation (EDA), design with a genetic material poses several challenges. In particular, genetic circuits are composed of very noisy components making their behavior more asynchronous, analog, and stochastic in nature. This talk presents our research in the development of GDA tools that leverage our past experiences in asynchronous circuit synthesis and formal verification. These tools enable synthetic biologists to construct models, efficiently analyze and visualize them, and synthesize a genetic circuit from a library of parts. Each step of this design process utilizes standard data representation formats enabling the ready exchange of results.