Team:KULeuven/Antifreeze

Modeling Antifreeze

1. Description of the Antifreeze system

For a full description, we refer to the extended project page. This page section only shows a brief summary of the antifreeze description.

The purpose of this subsystem is to synthesize antifreeze protein as respons on a given stimulus. In nature, the antifreeze protein is intracellularly produced by Pseudomonas Syringae to prevent cells from freezing. However in this project,we try to prevent the environment from freezing. In order to accomplish this, we design a new biobrick which gives rise to the coupling of the antifreeze protein to the extracellular membrane. To check if we have transcribed the antifreeze protein, we coupled melanin production to the inducible promoter as well. Melanin is a black pigment, which will visualise the antifreeze system.

The promoter we use for both proteins is the plux-CI promotor (BBa_R0065). It is a hybrid promoter responding to cI repressor and LuxR-AHL complex. CI repressor negatively regulates this promoter and LuxR-AHL complex activates its transcription. The effect of cI is dominant over LuxR-AHL.

ANTIFREEZE SCHEME

BIOBRICK ANTIFREEZE

ODEantifreeze2.pdf

We used the same kind of mathematical mass equations to describe the overall system. This will not be completely correct, but because of the complexity of the system, it would take too long to check the accuracy of every individual reaction and parameter in detail. In future research it would be interesting to improve the equations and some parameters which are indicated important in the sensitivity analysis. In the full model, the parameters and equations are most up to date.

PARAMETER TABLE

2. AntiFreeze Model

3. Simulations

4. Sensitivity analysis