Recent advancements in synthetic biology have enabled us to artificially construct biomolecular networks, or biocircuits, that produce desired dynamic functions such as bistability, oscillations and logic gates by assembling DNA parts. The importance of model-based design has been increasingly recognized as the circuit becomes more complicated in recent years.
In this talk, I will present theoretical and experimental frameworks for modeling, analyzing and prototyping biomolecular circuits. I will first introduce a control theoretic modeling framework by which the dynamics of biocircuits can be systematically translated into a class of Lur’e-type nonlinear systems. The structure of the system then allows us to develop theoretical tools for analyzing various dynamical behaviors including multi-stability, oscillations and spatial pattern formation of a cell population. Taking a recently developed oscillator circuit as an example, I will illustrate how these theoretical tools can be integrated with a microfluidic experimental platform to systematically design and tune the dynamics of biocircuits.
Yutaka Hori received the B.S degree in engineering, the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in information science and technology from the University of Tokyo in 2008, 2010 and 2013, respectively. He has been a postdoctoral scholar at California Institute of Technology since 2013. His current research interests lie in development of mathematical and experimental platforms for synthetic biology including system identification theory, and stochastic and nonlinear control. He was a Finalist of Best Student Paper Award at IEEE Multi-Conference on Systems and Control in 2010 and received multiple awards from SICE including Young Author’s Award at ICROS-SICE International Joint Conference in 2009 and Takeda Best Paper Award in 2015.
