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Turing meets synthetic biology: self-emerging patterns in an activator-inhibitor network
We present a synthetic network that emulates an activator-inhibitor system. Our goal is to show that spatio-temporal structures can be generated by the behavior of a genetic regulatory network.
We implement the model by means of several biobricks. We construct a self activating module and correspondingly an inhibitory one.
Self-activation dynamics is given by the las operon, while the inhibitory part is provided by the lux operon. Quorum sensing and diffusion of AHL provide the reaction-diffusion mechanism responsible for the formation of Turing patterns.
The importance of our work relies on the fact that we show that the action of the morphogenes as originally proposed by Turing is equivalent to the effect of diffusion of chemicals interacting with the synthetic network, which accounts for the reactive part, a possibility implicit in Turing’s original work in the context of morphogenesis of biological patterns.
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iGEM México
IPN-UNAM
