From 2007.igem.org

Introduction to EvoGEM

Project Description

Final Results of EvoGEM

ABSTRACT

Evolutionary design has been a tool that was used for many accomplishments. In this project the power of evolutionary programming is harnessed to produce viable genetic circuits. That is, strings of DNA that, like a program encoded in a cell, dictate a novel behavior for a bacterium. The application developed, EvoGEM, will be built upon in an attempt to create a more powerful tool that would capture the behavior that can fountain from a swarm based design. Swarm de- sign and evolutionary design are used in this model in order to create an application that can find genetic circuits that would produce a desired behavior before these are tested in a lab. Not only will such a tool be a stepping stone in developing more powerful models that can test designs in silico (virtually) before they are tested in vivo (in a living orgranism), but it will also allow for development of such designs.

The main goal for this project will be to develop EvoGEM to use evolutionary design,effecient mutation operators on these circuits and an effecient fitness function that can solve the relatively simple problem of synthesizing a requested molecule considering the existing bio-bricks. The problem can be easy or more challenging depending on whether or not the molecule is the result of a pathway. The system would be designed to solve both possibilities.