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The Moore's Law of Synthetic Gene Circuits

jacopogabrielli.substack.com · 3,809 words · saved by 1 readers

Why biology's circuits stopped scaling and what might change that

In the late 1950s, on either side of a corridor of the Institut Pasteur, seemingly unrelated efforts on E. coli’s sugar metabolism and the propensity of a virus to reproduce would converge into the discovery of the first two “gene circuits”. Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria and inject their genetic material, hijacking the cell’s machinery to produce new viruses that burst out of the cell. André Lwoff dedicated his career to understanding the regulation of this process that, at the time, was not even known to be genetic as DNA would gain prominence in biology only from the…

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