Different from what this press release says, bistability is a very well studied characteristic of many natural biological circuits, and is the basis for one of the first and most successful synthetic circuits back in 2000. What this paper shows is unexpected bistability emerging from how a cell responds to a synthetic network in an unpredicted way. It’s interesting to see papers in synthetic biology emerging now about how synthetic circuits are not as predictable as people originally may have expected, and that the cells themselves can “influence the running of the software.” These “failures” of models to accurately predict the behavior of a synthetic network are fascinating, especially when the results are unexpected emergent behaviors.
Can we use these kinds of experiments to better understand how complex cellular behaviors may have evolved? The idea of a passive living “chassis” where we can put our designed circuits is compelling from an industrial point of view, but it may not be what comes out of these kinds of experiments. As we try to eliminate the unpredictability of cells, will we also lose what makes living systems so robust and so fascinating?
