Chemical production and molecular computing in addressable reaction compartments

Abstract

Biological systems employ compartmentalisation in order to orchestrate a multitude of biochemical processes by simultaneously enabling "data hiding" and modularisation. In this paper, we present recent research projects that embrace compartmentalisation as an organisational programmatic principle in synthetic biological and biomimetic systems. In these systems, artificial vesicles and synthetic minimal cells are envisioned as nanoscale reactors for programmable biochemical synthesis and as chassis for molecular information processing. We present P systems, brane calculi, and the recently developed chemtainer calculus as formal frameworks providing data hiding and modularisation and thus enabling the representation of highly complicated hierarchically organised compartmentalised reaction systems. We demonstrate how compartmentalisation can greatly reduce the complexity required to implement computational functionality, and how addressable compartments permit the scaling-up of programmable chemical synthesis. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.