"Cellular behavior is governed by gene regulatory processes that are intrinsically dynamic and nonlinear, and are subject to non-negligible amounts of random fluctuations. Such conditions are ubiquitous in physical systems, where they have been studied for decades using the tools of statistical and nonlinear physics. The goal of this review is to show how approaches traditionally used in physics can help in reaching a systems-level understanding of living cells. To that end, we present an overview of the dynamical phenomena exhibited by genetic circuits and their functional significance. We also describe the theoretical and experimental approaches that are being used to unravel the relationship between circuit structure and function in dynamical cellular processes under the influence of noise, both at the single-cell level and in cellular populations, where intercellular coupling plays an important role."

"The design of genetic networks with specific functions is one of the major goals of synthetic biology. However, constructing biological devices that work "as required" remains challenging, while the cost of uncovering flawed designs experimentally is large. To address this issue, we propose a fully automated framework that allows the correctness of synthetic gene networks to be formally verified in silico from rich, high level functional specifications.
Given a device, we automatically construct a mathematical model from experimental data characterizing the parts it is composed of. The specific model structure guarantees that all experimental observations are captured and allows us to construct finite abstractions through polyhedral operations. The correctness of the model with respect to temporal logic specifications can then be verified automatically using methods inspired by model checking.
Overall, our procedure is conservative but it can filter through a large number of potential device designs and select few that satisfy the specification to be implemented and tested further experimentally. Illustrative examples of the application of our methods to the design of simple synthetic gene networks are included."