Synchronous Sequential Synthetic Biology

生物系统通常非常复杂，有许多相互作用和相互依赖的部分。越来越多的研究人员正在应用数学工具，其价值已被证明在其他领域的科学和工程，试图了解这样的系统。这一研究领域通常被称为系统生物学，这一领域的驱动力之一是生物学家可以获得的关于生物体所拥有的基因和这些基因提供编码的蛋白质的信息迅速增加。随着这方面知识的增加，已经有可能建立所谓的“合成生物回路”，与宿主（如细菌）有机体并行沿着运行。这些是合成的，因为整体结构不存在于自然界中，尽管单个组件存在。到目前为止，这些构建相对简单，由几个相互作用的基因组成。由于它们非常简单，这样的电路提供了一个理想的测试平台，以评估系统生物学方法的能力，以帮助理解这些功能。该项目将模拟拟议的合成生物电路，其中包括“时钟”电路（本身包括合成和自然），其功能是同步电路的整体动作，从而控制其运行。从本质上讲，这是一个问题，生物钟是否可以用在合成生物电路中，就像电子电路中的“时钟”一样。这可能会导致更复杂的合成电路和简单电路的集合的构建，这些电路由一个共同的时钟连接，从而执行更复杂的功能。这里再次存在与众所周知的数字电子电路的格式的直接相似之处。

Biological systems are generally very complicated with many interacting and interdependent parts. Increasingly researchers are applying mathematical tools whose value has been proven in other areas of science and engineering in an attempt to understand such systems. This field of research is often referred to as systems biology.One of the driving forces in this area is the rapid increase in information available to biologists in terms of the genes that organisms possess and proteins that these genes provide the code for. As this knowledge has increased it has become possible to build what have become known as 'synthetic biological circuits' that run along in parallel with the host (eg a bacteria) organism. These are synthetic in that the overall constructs do not exist in nature although the individual components do. To date those built are relatively simple consisting of several interacting genes. Because of their very simplicity such circuits provide an ideal testbed to assess the capabilities of a systems biology approach to aid in understanding how these function. This project will model proposed synthetic biological circuits that include 'clock' circuits (themselves both synthetic and natural) whose function is to synchronise the overall action of the circuit and so control its operation. Essentially this is aksing the question whether biological clocks can be used in synthetic biological circuits in the way that the 'clock' in electronic circuits are. This could lead the construction of both more complex synthetic circuits and collections of simple circuits that are linked by a common clock and so perform a collectively more complex function. Again there are direct parallels here to the format of well known digital electronic circuits.