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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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School of Physics Colloquium Series: Prof. Jeff Hasty, University of California, San Diego.
A defining component of Synthetic Biology is the development of theoretical modeling that can serve as the foundation for a new type of cellular engineering. This talk will be anchored by my quest to build genetic oscillators in bacteria, with a particular focus on the utility of theory and computation. I’ll start by describing how the coupling of transcriptional activators and repressors was originally modeled as a type of classical “predator-prey” system. Although this system led to the design of a robust intracellular clock (http://biodynamics.ucsd.edu/Intracellular.mov), I’ll show how the experiments pointed to a different type of “degrade and fire” oscillator characterized by a coupled set of delayed differential equations. Interestingly, the biological constraints naturally lead to a system that can be solved approximately. In terms of engineering, the clock was not of the Swiss variety; the period and amplitude exhibited large intracellular variability.
However, it provided a benchmark for the development of general synchronization strategies that can restore determinism. I’ll conclude with our efforts to use cellular communication to couple clocks between cells (http://biodynamics.ucsd.edu/Intercellular.mov) and colonies (http://biodynamics.ucsd.edu/Intercolony.mov). Here, the threshold nature of the communication mechanism leads naturally to oscillators that are highly reminiscent of “integrate and fire” systems in neuroscience.
