Biomolecular Breadboards
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A biomolecular breadboard is a system that is designed to allow certain features of a circuit to be tested in a carefully controlled setting. These breadboards can be used to implement, debug, and characterize a wide variety of circuits, including both in vivo and in vitro devices. This page contains an overview of different biomolecular breadboards that are available.
Breadboard overview
The figure above provides an overview of the basic breadboarding process. At the left is a circuit that we wish to implement and transform into a cell or other bimolecular chassis. Rather than try to directly get the circuit working in the cell, which requires time consuming iterations and difficult debugging, we instead use a sequence of simpler test environments ("breadboards"), where we can do much more rapid iterations between experiments, modeling and design.
Cell-free circuit breadboard
The cell-free circuit breadboard family is a sequence of in vitro protocols that can be used to test transcription and translation (TX-TL) circuits in a set of systematically-constructed environments that explore different elements of the external conditions in which the circuits must operate. This breadboard is based on the work of Vincent Noireaux at U. Minnesota.
