Team:Kyoto/GSDD/Introduction

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Motivation

Fig.1

In bioengineering, biologists design gene circuits as a mean to solve their facing problems such as medical problems, environmental problems, food problems, energy problems and so on. Then they suppose future implement like injection into human blood stream, scattering across natural environment etc. But in many cases those designed cells repeat cell division and increase its number in the environment. And then sometimes they got tiny internal errors like point mutation into their genes, but show us unexpected behavior and cause serious problems to its environment. This is one of the big problems, to solve that, we bioengineers have to make serious efforts. But it is quite difficult to propose an effective solution in many cases.

Many biologists try to prevent them by using other functionally designed gene circuits, intending cell’s population to be regulated by negative feedback loops and then, as a result, the cells cannot increase its number unlimitedly. But those indirect systematic regulations using other gene circuits are difficult to tune up its parameters to cells and its living environment. (Roughly to say, it is very messy.) So we hope to make a flexible method to directly control transformed cell’s behavior without using those obstinate gene circuits.