Team:PKU Beijing/Project

Back to the beginning of 20th century, Ivan Pavlov brought up the concept "conditioned reflex".

The famous work is done on dog. Ring bell is supposed to be a conditioned stimulus to the dog, when given the ring, no salivation happens to the dog. A training session, in which both the ring and the food are given to the dog, helps the dog build a relationship between the ring bell and the food. After that, the ring bell alone can cause salivation also. This work not only earned Pavlov the 1904 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, but is also a milestone for the research of learning and cognition.

Digging into the mechanism of the Conditioned Reflex (The memory of Correlation in the brain), it is thought that simultaneous activity of two neurons can bring them together. Hebbian Rule of Firing together, Wiring together is among the most famous theories. It is also the basis of “Artificial Neural Network”, which modifies the connectivity of two nodes in the network according to the concurrence of activity. Connectivity increases if the two nodes are activated or depressed at the same time, else, the connectivity is weakened. The molecular support of this theory is conformed when the phenomenon of “Long Term Potentiation” is discovered.

Here in PKU iGEM2009 Team, we want to build E.coli version of the classical “conditioned reflex” experiment.