Waterloo

Drawing on our diverse backgrounds, we bring a wide range of skills and modes of creative thinking to our iGEM project. The iGEM competition is providing us with an opportunity to become more familiar with the emerging field of synthetic biology in an engaging and fun atmosphere. In addition to gaining experience in the design, construction, and analysis of genetic circuits, we are also meeting the challenge of bringing together a large, diverse group toward a common goal.

Half adders are used as building blocks for full adders, which perform calculations similar to long addition but in binary. They are also an essential component in a device called the Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU), a fundamental building block for the central processing unit in a modern computer. ALUs perform simple and complex operations such as bitwise logical operations and mathematical operations.

The constructs for the half adder were built in parallel as well as the testing constructs. A future extension to this project would be to create a full adder. More information on each stage of the project is linked below.

• Binary addition and boolean logic
• Half-adder vs. full-adder designs
• Biological half-adder implementation

• Modelling the gene regulatory network
• Simulation results

• Strategy for half-adder construction
• Testing constructs for device
• Test execution plan
• Submitted parts

• Explanation of a full adder
• Gene design for full adder
• Implementation plan

• Dr. Trevor Charles
• Dr. Barbara Moffatt
• Dr. Joshua Neufeld