Edinburgh/DivisionPopper

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Revision as of 13:00, 17 September 2007

MENU : Introduction | Background | Applications | Design | Modelling | Status | Conclusions

THIS PROJECT IS BEING EDITED IN THESE DAYS, YOU MAY NOTICE NOT COMPLETED PAGES OR BROKEN LINKS.

The Division PoPper is a signal generator device that produces an output of PoPS as a function of bacterial cell division. In simple terms, it is a device that generated a "pulse" of PoPS signal each time a cell undertake division. Downstream of the device may be a counter device, quantifiable protein production or some other function of choice. The system may for example perform pre-determined actions such as programmed cell death after a set number of cell divisions or being used to calculate the division frequency. The device relies on dif recombinase sites to flip a DNA segment at each cell division. With this project we hope to further analyse cell division and recombinase mechanisms since bacterial cell division is still relatively poorly understood. We plan to construct and ligate the bricks required for a first proof of concept experiments. We model the device using various approaches (detemrnitistic and stochastic modelling) in order to guide lab work and analyse lab data. Modelling is used also to simulate the composition of our device with a counter device. In presenting our work, we highlight with comments and discussion the application of Synthetic Biology approaches at each work phase.

Division PoPper device

The Division PoPper device generates a pulse of PoPS signal at each cell division.

Sections:

The structure of the wiki for this project is composed of:

• This Introduction page with a brief overview.
• The Applications page with some possible uses of the Division PoPper.
• The Background page that explain what is the scientific background of our project and lists paper references validating our work.
• The Design page that explains the architecture and the mechanisms of the device in terms of abstraction levels and biological processes.
• The Modelling page containing the computational and mathematical investigation of the system behaviour.
• The Status page that reports what we have achieved so far.
• The Conclusions page that summarize which are our final consideration on the project.

A menu with the same links is present at the top of each page for facilitating navigation.