RNA-based Delay: Biosynthetic AND gate

It has been proved that in transcriptional cascades the responses in time can vary among individual cells in a population, the lost of synchronization suggest the need of additional regulation devices (4) such as autoregulatory motifs or feed-back loops. In our project we decided to apply an extra control by synthetic biology based on RNA and post-transcriptional control.

It has been shown how RNA molecules play important roles in regulatory mechanisms. Nowadays, synthetic biologists have elucidated many features of these molecules and have re-engineered them in order to increase or give new biological functions (6). Besides, the modularity present in different biological circuits and logic gates analogous to those from electric components has allowed building biological components. One example of this, and in which we are interested, is biological AND gates. In this kind of components, the output depends on the presence of two inputs (7). Riboregulators are RNA molecules which can perform both features, expression control and AND gate configurations. Therefore, we plan to construct a delay-device based on riboregulators (figure 9).

Figure 9. Biosynthetic AND gate. Combining an AND gate configuration and RNA-based post-transcriptional regulation, a device which might allows us to produce a delay is shown. Only when the key and the lock + ribosome binding site + GFP gene are together the output can be generated.

Preliminary approaches

RNA-based Delay, Biosynthetic AND gate: The plan

Results

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