Building reconfigurable circuitry in a biochemical world

Realizing complex systems within a biochemical environment is a common pursuit in synthetic biology, an emerging technology with promising potential in biomedicine and other applications. Such systems achieve certain computation through properly designed biochemical reactions. Despite fruitful progress being made, most existing reaction designs have fixed target functionality. Their lack of reconfigurability can be disadvantageous, especially when a system has to adapt to a varying biochemical environment. In this paper, we propose an analog approach to economically construct a reconfigurable logic circuit similar to a silicon based field programmable gate array (FPGA). The effective “logic” and “interconnect” of the circuit can be dynamically reconfigured by controlling the concentrations of certain knob species. We study a potential biomedical application of our reconfigurable circuitry to disease diagnosis and therapy at a molecular level.