Synthetic biologists rely on mathematical modelling to predict and tune the behaviour of experimentally implementable biomolecular systems. In addition to electronic engineering and control/system theoretic ideas, other characteristic properties of biological systems can be used to achieve complex behaviours. This paper considers the use of timescale separation and layered architectures in synthetic biomolecular systems. We discuss how, by constructing a biomolecular reaction network on two timescales, we are able (a) to implement nonlinear, tunable constraints on a network's state independently of its slow-scale dynamics, and (b) to control the slow dynamics of a network's state in a constrained state space.
['Thomas P. Prescott', 'Antonis Papachristodoulou']
Multi-scale design in layered synthetic biological systems