Team USTC

Our team is consist of members with different backgrounds, saying biology, mathematics, chemistry, computer science and physics, but with the same enthusiasm and confidence to do some thing both fundamental and original. We really appreciate your visit, and from this wiki you'll find records of our meetings and discussions, as well as keep up with our everyday progress.

Project E.ADEM

Evolution is more powerful than the God, as Charles Darwin told us 150 years ago. This year, our team is trying to manage the power of evolution, the power of creating everything from molecules to ecosystems, by engineering an E. coli Automatic Directed Evolution Machine (E.ADEM).

Our goal is to make E.ADEM a universal framework for directed evolution of almost anything: from promoters, regulators, receptors, binding partners, enzymes, aptamers, ribozymes and RBS, to sensors, logic devices, reporters, metabolic pathways, entire genomes, and even solutions of mathematic problems. The versatility of E.ADEM will be accomplished by its modular design and using PoPS as common signal carriers.

To each evolution object you want it to evolve, a scoring function can be designed to output PoPS as the score of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitness_%28biology%29 fitness], then you can ligate the scoring function into the E.ADEM plasmid, transform E. coli, culture the cells to let them evolve automatically and robustly, and get what you want.

E.ADEM is designed by implementing [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithms evolutionary algorithm] back into biology. The scoring function is connected to a logic controller module to adjust variation rate and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_pressure selection pressure]. The logic controller then calls 4 other modules, a quorum sensing device designed to calculate population size and average score, a variation function to change the evolution object by mutation or recombination, a selection function to control the survival or death of the cell, and a reporter module to report the score to the user. The detail of the project will be updated in the project page.