A couple articles in this week’s Science relating to the programmability of cells.
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6408/eaap8987 “This enables the design of cycles and developmental networks for engineering applications that require that cells exist in a particular state for an unspecified amount of time. For example, therapeutic cells could be built to sense transient stimuli, such as throughout the gastrointestinal tract, and switch to a new state when the next signal is encountered. There are similar applications for diagnostic cells (48<http://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6408/eaap8987#ref-48>, 76<http://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6408/eaap8987#ref-76>–81<http://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6408/eaap8987#ref-81>), pathways to complex chemicals and materials that require cycles of ordered operations (82<http://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6408/eaap8987#ref-82>), and sentinel plants and microbes with responsive traits (31<http://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6408/eaap8987#ref-31>, 83<http://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6408/eaap8987#ref-83>, 84<http://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6408/eaap8987#ref-84>).” http://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6408/1252 “For example, existing cancer-detection circuits (66<http://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6408/1252#ref-66>, 67<http://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6408/1252#ref-67>) could conditionally express CHOMP components to increase specificity and couple to protein-mediated inputs and outputs. Integrating these capabilities, one can envision smart therapeutics or sentinels based on CHOMP circuits (68<http://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6408/1252#ref-68>, 69<http://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6408/1252#ref-69>).” And those are the just some of the friendly applications. Marcus
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