During the Spring semester we held a weekly Journal Club to help get the entire team more familiar with the field of synthetic biology. Since the summer has begun, however, we have suspended the club and focused on our project. Here is a listing of the papers that we read during the semester.

(Click here to see the papers)

Jan. 30, 2007: "Construction of a Genetic Toggle Switch" (Gardner 2000)
Describes the design and construction of a synthetically produced genetic toggle switch in E. Coli.

Feb. 7, 2007: "Local Migration Promotes Competitive Restraint in a Host--pathogen 'Tragedy of the Commons' " (Kerr 2006)
Examines how different migration patterns between subpopulations affect the evolution of the entire population and how it relates to the 'tragedy of the commons'. Experiment is done with E. Coli and T4 phage.

Feb. 14, 2007: "Stochastic Kinetic Analysis of Developmental Pathway Bifurcation in Phage Lambda-Infected Escherichia coli Cells" (Arkin 1997)
Stochastically models the lysis-lysogeny decision in Phage Lambda-Infected E. Coli cells at the molecular level.

Feb. 21, 2007: "The Role of the Airline Transportation Network in the Prediction and Predictability of Global Epidemics" (Colizza 2006)
Predicts the spread of an epidemic through air travel.

Mar. 21, 2007: "A Bottom-up Approach to Gene Regulation" (Guido 2006)
Builds a pair of simple synthetic genetic networks and uses the results to predict the behavior of a more complicated network involving a combination of both original networks.

Mar. 28, 2007: "Synthetic Biology Project in Vitro" (Forster 2007)
Describes a number of current in vitro projects in synthetic biology.

Apr. 11, 2007: "A Synthetic Phage Lambda Regulatory Circuit" (Atsumi 2006)
Attempts to construct a synthetic version of the phage lambda regulatory circuit by replacing key components with similar ones commonly used in synthetic genetic circuits.