Intracellularly Coupled Oscillators for Synthetic Biology

Synthetic biology aims to engineer or re-engineer living systems. To achieve increasingly complex functionalities, it is beneficial to use higher-level building blocks. In this study, we focus on oscillators as such building blocks and model the interactions of intracellularly coupled oscillators. We classify these oscillators on the basis of coupling strength: independent, weakly or strongly coupled, and intrinsically coupled. We predict a range of fascinating phenomena to arise in these systems, such as beat phenomena, amplitude and frequency modulation, period doubling, higher-period oscillations, chaos, resonance, and synchronization, with the aim of guiding future experimental work in bacterial synthetic biology. Finally, we propose novel oscillator-based circuit designs and outline potential applications, including oscillator-based computers that integrate processing and memory functions, offering multistate and nonlinear processing capabilities.