Molecular circuits for dynamic noise filtering

Abstract

The invention of the Kalman filter is a crowning achievement of filtering theory—one that has revolutionized technology in countless ways. By dealing effectively with noise, the Kalman filter has enabled various applications in positioning, navigation, control, and telecommunications. In the emerging field of synthetic biology, noise and context dependency are among the key challenges facing the successful implementation of reliable, complex, and scalable synthetic circuits. Although substantial further advancement in the field may very well rely on effectively addressing these issues, a principled protocol to deal with noise—as provided by the Kalman filter—remains completely missing. Here we develop an optimal filtering theory that is suitable for noisy biochemical networks. We show how the resulting filters can be implemented at the molecular level and provide various simulations related to estimation, system identification, and noise cancellation problems. We demonstrate our approach in vitro using DNA strand displacement cascades as well as in vivo using flow cytometry measurements of a light-inducible circuit in Escherichia coli.