Team:UT Dallas/oscillator

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An oscillator is a system that repeatedly goes back and forth about a specific value to achieve an equilibrium. Many think of an oscillator as being a physical system such as a pendulum or a clock, but oscillators are also repeatedly found in biological systems. Biological oscillators are characterized by a positive and negative feedback loop.
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Our secondary project involved creating another toggle switch similar in nature to our first mechanism that would serve as a relationship between two different populations of bacteria. Our dual population toggle would be equivalent to our single population toggle in its use, but split up into two populations of cells. That is, the activation of one population would mean the deactivation of the other population. We hoped to achieve this by utilizing basic components as used in our single population toggle strain along with other parts that allowed the two strains to communicate with each other via quorum signalling. When one population was “deactivated” it would secrete quorum signalling molecules that would activate the creation of fluorescence proteins in the other population. The fluorescing population was considered to be in the “activated” state. In this state, inhibitor proteins would be created alongside the fluorescence proteins in order to turn off the production of signalling molecules.Similar to our single strain toggle switch, adding either IPTG or ATc would flip the switch from one state to the other by preventing the targeted inhibitor proteins from binding to their respective promoters.
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For our oscillator, we created three different strains. These strains used three different quorum sensing molecules AHL, AI1, and AI2 coupled with yellow, red, and blue fluorescence proteins to create an oscillating effect.
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Revision as of 21:14, 3 October 2012

Our secondary project involved creating another toggle switch similar in nature to our first mechanism that would serve as a relationship between two different populations of bacteria. Our dual population toggle would be equivalent to our single population toggle in its use, but split up into two populations of cells. That is, the activation of one population would mean the deactivation of the other population. We hoped to achieve this by utilizing basic components as used in our single population toggle strain along with other parts that allowed the two strains to communicate with each other via quorum signalling. When one population was “deactivated” it would secrete quorum signalling molecules that would activate the creation of fluorescence proteins in the other population. The fluorescing population was considered to be in the “activated” state. In this state, inhibitor proteins would be created alongside the fluorescence proteins in order to turn off the production of signalling molecules.Similar to our single strain toggle switch, adding either IPTG or ATc would flip the switch from one state to the other by preventing the targeted inhibitor proteins from binding to their respective promoters.

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