Team:Tsinghua-A

Tsinghua-A has joined iGEM twice and both made good grades.This year ,Tsinghua-A is made up 12 members. The group members are in second or third year, and have participated a interdiscipline research interest group in synthetic biology from last year. We are from various backgrounds, such as Automation, Chemistry, Biomedical Engineering and Art&Design.

This year, our team’s project is about ‘Synthetic gene switch shows adaptation to DNA copy number variation’.

In some natural and synthetic biological networks, DNA copy number which transfection into cells is fluctuant，influencing gene expression. We hope target gene expression level has a strong adaptability and ability to DNA copy number by using the method of engineering and bringing in incoherent feed-forward circuit. The robust circuits we designed may apply to cancer detection and gene therapy in the future.

Generally speaking, we modeled three and four nodes motifs to find some appropriate circuits, which function reliably in the face of fluctuating stoichiometry of their molecular components. We already have tested two designed circuits and found that the motifs has certain robustness to DNA copy number. We will test more networks to make exact results on the basis of simulations in the following day.