Homeostasis is a running theme in biology. Often achieved through feedback regulation strategies, homeostasis allows living cells to control their internal environment as a means for surviving changing and unfavourable environments. While many endogenous homeostatic motifs have been studied in living cells, synthetic homeostatic circuits have received far less attention. The tight regulation of the abundance of cellular products and intermediates in the noisy environment of the cell is now recognised as a critical requirement for several biotechnology and therapeutic applications . Here we lay the foundation for a regulation theory at the molecular level that explicitly takes into account the noisy nature of biochemical reactions and provides novel tools for the analysis and design of robust synthetic homeostatic circuits. Using these ideas, we propose a new regulation motif that implements an integral feedbackstrategy which can generically and effectively regulate{\em  a wide class of reaction networks. By combining tools from probability and control theory, we show that the proposed control motif preserves the stability of the overall network, steers the population of any regulated species to a desired set point, and achieves robust perfect adaptation -- all without any prior knowledge of reaction rates. Moreover, our proposed control motif can be implemented using a very small number of molecules and hence has a negligible metabolic load. Strikingly, the regulatory motif exploits stochastic noise, leading to enhanced regulation in scenarios where noise-free implementations result in dysregulation. Several examples demonstrate the potential of the approach .
Homeostasis is a running theme in biology. Often achieved through feedback regulation strategies, homeostasis allows living cells to control their internal environment as a means for surviving changing and unfavourable environments. While many endogenous homeostatic motifs have been studied in living cells, some other motifs may remain under-explored or even undiscovered. At the same time, known regulatory motifs have been mostly analyzed at the deterministic level, and the effect of noise on their regulatory function has received low attention . Here we lay the foundation for a regulation theory at the molecular level that explicitly takes into account the noisy nature of biochemical reactions and provides novel tools for the analysis and design of robust homeostatic circuits. Using these ideas, we propose a new regulation motif , which we refer to as{\em antithetic integral feedback, and demonstrate its effectiveness as a strategy for generically regulating a wide class of reaction networks. By combining tools from probability and control theory, we show that the proposed motif preserves the stability of the overall network, steers the population of any regulated species to a desired set point, and achieves robust perfect adaptation -- all with low prior knowledge of reaction rates. Moreover, our proposed regulatory motif can be implemented using a very small number of molecules and hence has a negligible metabolic load. Strikingly, the regulatory motif exploits stochastic noise, leading to enhanced regulation in scenarios where noise-free implementations result in dysregulation. Finally, we discuss the possible manifestation of the proposed antithetic integral feedback motif in endogenous biological circuits and its realization in synthetic circuits .
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synthetic homeostatic circuits have received far less attention. The tight regulation of the abundance of cellular products and intermediates in the noisy environment of the cell is now recognised as a critical requirement for several biotechnology and therapeutic applications
some other motifs may remain under-explored or even undiscovered. At the same time, known regulatory motifs have been mostly analyzed at the deterministic level, and the effect of noise on their regulatory function has received low attention
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synthetic
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that implements an integral feedbackstrategy which can generically and effectively regulate
, which we refer to as
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antithetic integral feedback, and demonstrate its effectiveness as a strategy for generically regulating
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control
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without any
with low
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control
regulatory
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Several examples demonstrate the potential of the approach
Finally, we discuss the possible manifestation of the proposed antithetic integral feedback motif in endogenous biological circuits and its realization in synthetic circuits