From Reddit: > Cello was designed to allow for logical development of large DNA circuits from a general functional description. > You could say "I want a cell

From Reddit: > Cello was designed to allow for logical development of large DNA circuits from a general functional description. > You could say "I want a cell that can detect arsenic, mercury, and cadmium in water and provide different color output signals. Also, those output signals should correlate to the concentration of metal detected." Cello would look through its database for promoters that detect those metals and genes that produce chromophores or fluorophores. And then it would look for various modulators and feedback loops to make sure the amount of color produced is measurably relative to the signal. It would produce possible combinations of circuits that could have the function requested (different gene order, different orientations, different modulators, etc.) and the assembly plans to build those in the lab so they can be tested. > It's easy to mix and match a few promoters, even a half dozen or so. But once you start adding a large number of small circuits together, it simply gets too complex to scribble out the permutations on paper. > Much of the credit for this tool goes to Prashant Vaidyanathan at Boston University, the forth author on the manuscript who did a large portion of the coding. It's a joint initiative between Boston University and MIT, initiated by the CIDAR lab at Boston. > Source: I just graduated from this group. https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/4dbvmr/mit_develops_cello_a_programming_language_for/d1q0dre https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/4dbvmr/mit_develop... (To clarify, I'm not the author of this summary, just found the post. Reply there if you want to get in touch with him/her!)