A CRISPR/Cas9-based central processing unit to program complex logic computation in human cells

Abstract

Controlling gene expression with sophisticated logic gates has been and remains one of the central aims of synthetic biology. However, conventional implementations of biocomputers use central processing units (CPUs) assembled from multiple protein-based gene switches, limiting the programming flexibility and complexity that can be achieved within single cells. Here, we introduce a CRISPR/Cas9-based core processor that enables different sets of user-defined guide RNA inputs to program a single transcriptional regulator (dCas9-KRAB) to perform a wide range of bitwise computations, from simple Boolean logic gates to arithmetic operations such as the half adder. Furthermore, we built a dual-core CPU combining two orthogonal core processors in a single cell. In principle, human cells integrating multiple orthogonal CRISPR/Cas9-based core processors could offer enormous computational capacity.

Keywords: biocomputing; genetic engineering; synthetic biology.