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Epigenetic Flip Flop. Overview

There are still some open questions and challenges in synthetic biology at the basic level, as how to handle with noise, efficient designing of novel proteins with desirable functions, or epigenetic control of gene expression, between others. (Purnick & Weiss, 2009) Our project, FLASHBACTER, tries to reduce this uncertainty.

The goal of our subproject is developing an epigenetic toggle switch, that make use of both transcriptional and epigenetic regulation, to precisely control gene expression of a gene reporter. We hope to maintain the whole population of Schizosaccaromyces pombe in one of two states, denominated ON and OFF, depending on whether the reporter gene is being expressed or not. What we expect by employing this combination of promoter regulation at the transcriptional level and epigenetic control level of compaction of the promoter DNA region is to reduce the noise that normally remains in many promoters after transcriptional repression. Moreover, it is expected that cells become able to pass on this epigenetic information to their descendants, behaving as a robust, heritable and stable memory.