Team:LCG-UNAM-Mexico:Population model

Population model

Some bacteriophages are parasites of bacteria, and as such, must prudently exploit their resources (in this case bacteria) to avoid killing bacterium before reproduce enough copies of itself. It has been suggested that parasites have evolved to tune their degree of virulence (amount of damage the parasite causes to the host) to achieve a balance between rapid reproduction and a prudent use of resources [1]. It is this fine balance which we intend to break, increasing the virulence of phage in such a way that kills the bacterium so fast that the phage is unable to assemble their own copies.

Bacteria-phage interaction essentially is a fight for survival between two populations. Although we modified E. coli at the molecular level to prevent the replication of T7 and T3 , our ultimate goal is that E. coli can contend against infection at population level. For this reason we decided to simulate, at population level, phage infection and the effectiveness of our genetic circuit.

For this purpose, we use three different approaches:

• Modelling population dynamics with a system of differential equations.
• Spatial agent-based model.
• Modeling bacteria behaviour and Bacteriophage infection using Cellular Automata.