After several months of work, little sleep, a lot of coffee, the biggest depreciation of Mexican peso since 1994, and TONS of fun (required for winning a medal), the LCG-UNAM-Mexico team finally got over all its members’ crisis and was able to put together all the bits of information and carried all the experiments and measurements, finished the controls and analyzed the results.
First of all, the measuring device (the one which measures resistivity), was calibrated with different but known nickel and cell concentrations. Then, measurements where performed with our modified cells and the rate at which nickel enters and leaves the cell was estimated.
Meanwhile, extensive literature search was carried out in order to implement a mathematical model to represent the dynamics of the system. Once the experimentally estimated parameters were in place, only two free parameters remained and their relevance was analyzed.
The overall result is that the general behavior of the system is understood and formalized through a set of differential equations; it is also shown that resistivity can be readily related to transcriptional activity, adding a powerful tool to the molecular biologist’s toolbox.
  
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