Team:British Columbia/Model
Model Goals
In order to implement our sensing device, we had to gain a better understanding of our potential biosensors. In particular, we need to understand how the biosensor output changes with the change of different parameters such as toxin concentration or promoter strength. Therefore, we decided to model our system’s GFP expression based on input from the biosensor device. The main goals we wanted to achieve are understanding how our device output changes as a function of:
- Change in substrate (toxin) concentration (sensitivity)
- Range of substrate (toxin) concentrations
- Change of promoter strength (biosensor and GFP promoters)
- Change of population size
- Change in initial conditions
Model Approach
Our modelling approach is based on ordinary differential equations that model the dynamic behaviour of our system. We break the model down into two parts. Part (I) is involved with the biosensor device binding and activation, and GFP promoter activation. Part (II) is concerned with GFP expression with relation to GFP Promoter binding. Part (II) is based on a previous paper for GFP expression modelling (1).
Materials and Code
The repo of our model and code can be found here.