Team:Peking
Abstract
How did we think about
Scientists in the field of synthetic biology have always been making analogies between elements in a cell and electronic components. They want to make a rigid and immutable framework. However, even E. coli, the most ordinary host cell in a lab, can exhibit remarkable variance in its general physiology, and can be characterized from different aspects. These parameters can affect the 'desired' function of synthetic bio-parts directly or indirectly, which makes it difficult to build an absolutely rigid system. Previously, scientists using antibiotic or killer switch to kill the cell completely in order to control cell growth. But we thought that a reversible and tunable tool can be a better way to control cell growth. Curious about solving this problem, we took months of work to build our system, the dCas9 based DNA replication control system, a growth control toolbox directly targeting genome replication.
Demonstrate
Through a series of demonstration experiments, we have proved that our system can increase the expression of some products, and our strain has good adhesion.
Design
The function of our system is to slow down bacterial replication by combining dcas9 with oriC. On this basis, we also designed many different gene circuits to expand the function of our system.
Model
We set up a series of models to quantitatively describe and analyze our experiment results. Our models can explain all kinds of phenomena observed in our experiment. They can explain the working principle of our system well.
Results
We have carefully characterized the engineered bacteria we designed, found that they can work in the way we expected, and explored their potential functions.