Does DNA have the equivalent of IF-statements, WHILE loops, or function calls?

Re:Does DNA have the equivalent of IF-statements, WHILE loop... by FLT8 on Wednesday January 10, 2024 @04:04PM (#38943116)

Sounds exciting, but also a little scary.

I'm imagining a biological variant of eg. Verilog or VHDL, as this seems like the kind of domain where tools that allow for formal verification would be highly desirable.

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Re:Does DNA have the equivalent of IF-statements, WHILE loop... by stultissimus on Wednesday January 10, 2024 @04:48PM (#38943717)

This has actually been done for genetic circuits in E coli (bacteria) by Chris Voight's lab at MIT. Their platform is called Cello [1], and it enables interoperation between Verilog/HDL and genetic code. This kind of thing has not yet reached practical utility in human cell engineering, but companies like Asimov [2] are pushing hard in that direction

[1] https://www.cidarlab.org/cello

[2] https://www.asimov.com/

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