Bacterial ‘Amitosis’

So far we have successfully constructed a novel system in which bacterial colonies will automatically divide into two parts after certain time. Over the summer we have been working on assembling riboswitches finely tuned by small molecules, which will act as the main power to drive two parts away from each other, and toggle switches pushed on and off while memorizing current state, which will play the role of giving birth to two ‘different’ kinds of bacteria in one colony. Furthermore, we have been modulating the toggle switch to produce a more balanced ratio and creatively integrating quorum sensing into our system to optimize our results. As to modeling, we have not only been building models of the movement in this ‘amitosis’, but also been collecting and analyzing data for a aptamers database for small molecules and corresponding genomic sequences and structures in guiding bacteria.