Design and Analysis of a Proportional-Integral-Derivative Controller with Biological Molecules

Michael Chevalier; Mariana Gómez-Schiavon; Andrew H Ng; Hana El-Samad

doi:10.1016/j.cels.2019.08.010

Design and Analysis of a Proportional-Integral-Derivative Controller with Biological Molecules

Cell Syst. 2019 Oct 23;9(4):338-353.e10. doi: 10.1016/j.cels.2019.08.010. Epub 2019 Sep 25.

Authors

Michael Chevalier¹, Mariana Gómez-Schiavon², Andrew H Ng³, Hana El-Samad⁴

Affiliations

¹ Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of California, San Francisco, 600 16th St., San Francisco, CA 94158, USA. Electronic address: michael.chevalier@ucsf.edu.
² Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of California, San Francisco, 600 16th St., San Francisco, CA 94158, USA.
³ Cell Design Initiative, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94150, USA.
⁴ Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of California, San Francisco, 600 16th St., San Francisco, CA 94158, USA; Cell Design Initiative, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94150, USA; Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub, 499 Illinois St., San Francisco, CA 94158, USA. Electronic address: hana.el-samad@ucsf.edu.

PMID: 31563473
DOI: 10.1016/j.cels.2019.08.010

Abstract

The capability to engineer de novo feedback control with biological molecules is ushering in an era of robust functionality for many applications in biotechnology and medicine. To fulfill their potential, these control strategies need to be generalizable, modular, and operationally predictable. Proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control fulfills this role for technological systems. Integral feedback control allows a system to return to an invariant steady-state value after step disturbances. Proportional and derivative feedback control used with integral control modulate the dynamics of the return to steady state following perturbation. Recently, a biomolecular implementation of integral control was proposed based on an antithetic motif in which two molecules interact stoichiometrically to annihilate each other's function. In this work, we report how proportional and derivative implementations can be layered on top of this integral architecture to achieve a biochemical PID control design. We investigate computationally and analytically their properties and ability to improve performance.

Keywords: PID control; biological control; integral control; synthetic biology.

Publication types

Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

Animals
Bioengineering / methods*
Biotechnology
Computer Simulation
Feedback, Physiological
Humans
Models, Theoretical*