Starting in the early 2000s, a sophisticated technology has been developed for the rational construction of synthetic genetic networks that implement specified logical functionalities. Despite impressive progress, however, the scaling necessary in order to achieve greater computational power has been hampered by many constraints, including repressor toxicity and the lack of large sets of mutually-orthogonal repressors. As a consequence, a typical circuit contains no more than roughly seven repressor-based gates per cell. A possible way around this scalability problem is to distribute the computation among multiple cell types, which communicate among themselves using diffusible small molecules (DSMs) and each of which implements a small sub-circuit. Examples of DSMs are those employed by quorum sensing systems in bacteria. This paper focuses on systematic ways to implement this distributed approach, in the context of the evaluation of arbitrary Boolean functions.

中文翻译：

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转录合成电路对布尔函数的分布式实现

从2000年代初期开始，已经开发出一种复杂的技术，用于合理构建实现特定逻辑功能的合成遗传网络。尽管取得了令人瞩目的进步，但是为实现更大的计算能力所必需的缩放仍受到许多限制，包括阻遏物毒性和缺少大量相互正交的阻遏物。结果，一个典型的电路每个单元包含不超过七个基于阻遏器的门。解决此可伸缩性问题的一种可能方法是在多个单元类型之间分配计算，这些单元类型之间使用可扩散的小分子（DSM）进行通信，并且每个单元都实现一个小的子电路。DSM的示例是细菌中群体感应系统采用的那些DSM。