Team:Tsinghua-A

An SSRs System Based Toggle Switch and More

向左表达？向右表达？细菌人生

基于特异性位点重组酶系统的双稳态开关及其衍生项目

Idea

‘Life’ is too big a word, especially when we are talking about synthetic biology, but we still find it interesting, in our life, when everyone meets alternatives and makes his decisions, that colorful behaviors and lifestyles just differentiate from small left-or-right choices, and that widely-differed ones make up a well-operated society. This year our study will be concentrated on controllable choice-making E. Coli, with left-or-right directions of gene expression to be determined, thus to realize the life-like differentiation and dedifferentiation, and synthesized function of the cell ‘teamwork’. That’s the idea why we named our project after ‘E. CoLIFE’.

灵感

虽然我们在谈合成生物学，可是还是一不小心扯到“人生”这个大命题。偶尔去想，世界的多元竟然是由每个人每一次“向左走、向右走”的小决定来实现，而这样的多元相融又能够和谐运行，实在是一件有趣的事。因而我们将目光聚焦于“能做决定”的大肠杆菌，通过控制一组基因向左或向右的表达，努力去模拟以实现仿生的分化和去分化，并创意地构造功能可控的基因“团队”。 我们称之为“细菌人生”。以上。

Overview

The season 2012 will witness a great leap further for Team Tsinghua-A. In our second year of this game, we iGEMers focus on a special kind of enzymes named site-specific recombinases (SSRs), and will hopefully achieve the goal of the construction of a symmetric toggle switch to ‘make cell choices’, with problems on close loop control and robustness to be worked out. Beyond the basic switch we are still more ambitious, eagerly to design, and to some extent realize a programmable E. Coli gene sequence, with the combinations of multifunctional AND/OR switch segments, the idea of which comes from FPGA, a programmable gate array widely used in electronics development.

概述

这是清华大学自动化系合成生物学团队运行的第二年。这一次，我们将蓝色手套伸向了位点特异性重组酶，并期望以闭环控制方式，建构具有稳健性及对称性的双稳态开关，达成向左走向右走的抉择单元。而更深入的计划指向一个可编程的大肠杆菌基因序列，基于一系列开关可控的与/或/非处理单元。类比电子学中可编程门阵列，我们乐观地看到生物逻辑程控系统的诞生。