科学美国人60秒 细胞电路可以用DNA计算出来（在线收听）

Our smartphones, tablets, laptops—they all compute things electronically. But, think outside that silicon box for a second: "There's nothing special about electrons and using silicon as part of computing." Chris Voigt, a bioengineer at M.I.T.. "You can do computing with any number of things." Including, he says, DNA.

我们的智能手机、平板电脑、笔记本——它们都是以电子方式进行计算。但是，考虑一下那个箱子之外的事物：“利用电子和硅进行计算并没有什么特殊的。” 克里斯·沃伊特是麻省理工学院的生物工程师。“你可以利用计算机计算任何事物的数量。”这其中，就包括DNA。

"Cells do computing all the time. So they're constantly trying to interpret their environment and be able to turn on different genes and respond to it." And those genes in a cellular circuit are like the logic gates, the memory, and other systems found in conventional computers.

“细胞一直都在进行计算。所以，它们一直在试图了解周围的环境，并控制DNA，并对其作出反应。”这些在细胞电路中的基因就像传统电脑中的逻辑门、内存和其他的系统。

So Voigt and his colleagues created what he calls the first human-made "programming language" for living cells. It’s an open-source design environment called "Cello." Just write what you want the cell to do, and Cello spits out the DNA sequence—as if you were compiling code. The researchers used the platform to design 60 genetic circuits, which they then ran inside E. coli bacteria. Many of these DNA-based circuits allow bacteria to sense environmental data - like levels of oxygen or glucose in the gut - and respond in various ways. They detail the findings in the journal Science.

所以，沃伊特和同事们创造了人类首例的活细胞“编程语言”。这种开放源码的设计环境称为“Cello”。你只需写下需要细胞做些什么，这时候Cello翻译DNA序列——就好像你在进行编码。研究人员利用这一平台设计了60个遗传电路，他们可以利用这些遗传电路应用于大肠杆菌内部。许多基于DNA的电路都允许细菌感觉环境数据——例如大肠中的氧气以及葡萄糖的含量——并通过不同的方式作出反应。该研究结果发表在《科学》杂志上。

Not all the circuits worked as intended. A quarter of them failed, and some were toxic to the cells. But the idea is to make cellular circuit design easier—and more approachable—to creative people. "When I was a graduate student I had a computer file for Microsoft Word that had all my favorite pieces of DNA. And I would have to sit there and stitch it together and try to remember how each one worked, and constantly run programs to try to look for mistakes."

但是并不是所有的电路都会按照预期的方式运行。有1/4的电路失败了，而有的电路则会毒害细胞。但是，这种创作想法会使有创新精神的人将细胞电路设计更加简单——更易成功。“当我还在读研究生的时候，我有一个电脑文件里面包含了我最爱的DNA片段。我会坐在那里，将这些片断拼接到一起，并试图记住这些片断是如何运作的，我还经常运行程序试图找到其中的错误。”

Cello takes care of all that. And now, Voigt says, biology is right about where electrical engineering was in the early 80s: ready for a computing revolution.

Cello会处理以上所有的问题。现在，沃伊特称生物学就像80年代早期的电器工程：已经为计算机革命做好准备。