Team:LCG-UNAM-Mexico:Population

INTRODUCTION TO 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) [1] to achieve a balance between rapid reproduction and a prudent use of resources. It is this fine balance that has the phage as a strategy we intend to play the break to increase the virulence of phage so fast to kill the bacteria 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 molecular level to defend itself against certain phages, 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.