Science Daily  April 18, 2019
Through cooperative self-assembly, multivalent transcription factor complexes perform non-linear regulatory operations involved in cellular decision-making and signal processing. Using this principle, a team of researchers in the US (Rice University, BU, Brandeis University, MIT, Harvard University) shows that specifying strength and number of assembly subunits enables predictive tuning between linear and non-linear regulatory response for single- and multi-input circuits. They harnessed this capability to engineer circuits that perform dynamic filtering, enabling frequency-dependent decoding in cell populations. Programmable cooperative assembly provides a versatile way to tune nonlinearity of network connections, dramatically expanding the engineerable behaviors available to synthetic circuits…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLEÂ
The more modules a self-assembled transcription complex contains (bottom, left to right), the more sharply it responds to the critical threshold. Credit: Rice University