With twice great performance previous 2 years, 2013 Tsinghua-A team now consists of 12 sophomores and juniors of various majors (automation, chemistry, biomedical engineering and art & design), who have gone through an one-year interdiscipline research interest training program concerning synthetic biology.
Our project is ‘Synthetic gene switch shows adaptation to DNA copy number variation’. In some natural and synthetic biological networks, DNA copy number transfected into cells is fluctuant，influencing the process of 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.
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