Ying-Cheng Lai

eLife Assessment The paper presents valuable computational findings on how growth feedback affects the performance of synthetic gene circuits designed for adaptive responses. By systematically analyzing over four hundred circuit topologies, the authors provide solid evidence for their conclusions on failure mechanisms and design features that enhance robustness against growth dynamics.

Data-driven model discovery of complex dynamical systems can be done using sparse optimization, but it has a fundamental limitation: sparsity in that the underlying governing equations of the system contain only a small number of elementary mathematical functions. Examples where sparse optimization fails abound, including the classic Ikeda or optical-cavity map in nonlinear dynamics, as well as a wide variety of ecosystems.