Team:Aberdeen Scotland/modeling/conclusion

University of Aberdeen iGEM 2009

iGEM 2009

Conclusions

Thoughtout the summer, the modeling and biological aspects of the project worked well together, our main results were:

Guiding the biology in choosing the best design for implementing the pico plumber.
Effectively modelled the behavior of mRNA transcription and protein translation, using both deterministic and stochastic methods.
Analysis of all of the important parameters in the deterministic and stochastic systems which let us investigate the robustness of our system and maximise it.
Created a probabilistic chemotaxis model, which reproduced the behaviour of E.coli cells as accurately as possible. The model took into account both movement when no chemotactic gradient was sensed by the e.coli and when they had sensed a chemotactic gradient and were moving up it.
From our models, we concluded that the original design would not work, since it would turn on it's own quorum sensing. We then came up with two alternative designs for the quorum sensing module. We then tested them and found one which produced the required response and was far more robust to parameter changes than the original design.
Combined the data from the amended stochastic model with the chemotaxis model to create a combined population model to investigate the complete system behaviour.
We proposed that a parameter database be created, so that modeling done by future iGEM teams could be done faster, more easily and more accurately by having access to a central source of biological parameters.