A method for design of expression tracking controllers for gene regulatory networks

Abstract

As the synthetic biology community continues to refine experimental techniques for construction of gene regulatory networks, there is continued need for computational design tools to efficiently achieve desired performance. Tracking controllers play a fundamental role in a range of control engineering tasks. In this paper we address the design of expression tracking controllers for gene regulatory networks. We employ a class of simple networks as controllers and describe gene expression dynamics via a piecewise affine approximation of general nonlinear model formulations. We propose a method for the design of tracking controllers. In the case of regulation of the activity of a single gene, we derive an analytic description of a parameterization of tracking controllers. The results are illustrated with numerical examples.