Formal Methods for the Synthesis of Biomolecular Circuits

This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 18082 "Formal Methods for the Synthesis of Biomolecular Circuits". Synthetic biology aims for the rational bottom-up engineering of new biological functionalities. Recent years have witnessed an increase in the degree of "rationality" in the design of synthetic biomolecular circuits. With it, fewer design-build-test cycles were necessary to achieve a desired circuit performance. Most of these success stories reported the realization of logic circuits, typically operating via regulation of gene expression and/or direct manipulation of DNA sequences with recombinases, executing combinatorial and sometimes sequential logic. This was often achieved with the help of two ingredients, a library of previously well-characterized parts and some computational modeling. Hence, although circuits in synthetic biology are still by far less understood and characterized than electronic circuits, the opportunity for the formal synthesis of circuit designs with respect to a behavioral specification starts to emerge in synthetic biology.