How to turn a genetic circuit into a synthetic tunable oscillator, or a bistable switch

Abstract

Systems and Synthetic Biology use computational models of biological pathways in order to study in silico the behaviour of biological pathways. Mathematical models allow to verify biological hypotheses and to predict new possible dynamical behaviours. Here we use the tools of non-linear analysis to understand how to change the dynamics of the genes composing a novel synthetic network recently constructed in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae for In-vivo Reverse-engineering and Modelling Assessment (IRMA). Guided by previous theoretical results that make the dynamics of a biological network depend on its topological properties, through the use of simulation and continuation techniques, we found that the network can be easily turned into a robust and tunable synthetic oscillator or a bistable switch. Our results provide guidelines to properly re-engineering in vivo the network in order to tune its dynamics. © 2009 Marucci et al.