Transcription factors

The syn. trans. factor system designed by caroline & david. cite memory.

• modularity
• extensibility

The laboratory of Dr. Pamela Silver at Harvard developed synthetic transcription factors for the construction of a novel “memory device” in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. While the details of this device are not essential to understanding our own gene network, it is important to discuss the significance of these transcription factors to our design. A transcription factor is composed of a binding domain, which targets the protein either an activation domain or a repression domain, which

Transcription factors are composed of a standard activation or repression domain linked to a variable binding domain. The binding domain is chosen such that it matches. Other features of these . A handful of these parts were available in the Registry, but we found it necessary to

The Biofusion Standard

Compared to other fields in biology, synthetic biology devotes a considerable amount of attention towards the standardization of parts and of practice. The inspiration for such a focus stems from similar concepts in engineering, which depends upon well-characterized systems for design. Indeed, this very iGEM competition focuses on the use of the Biobrick standard, which is an idempotent approach to cloning recombinant DNA. The Biobrick standard constitutes a conserved sequence of sites

Modularity – in order to modify the design to limit the expression of a given gene of interest, one must study a gene pathway map and identify a single link between the gene of interest and a transcription factor that regulates the expression of that gene

Stipulation: If G is a transcription factor that is known to auto-regulate, one will have to alter the modeling to account for this situation.

modifications to current scheme:

• Ribozyme switch inhibition to knockdown leakiness of Repressor#3 (this would need to designed so that the aptamer on the repressor #3 mRNA responds to Repressor #2 protein)
• alternatively, could consider having the promoter for construct Y produce an shRNA instead of a repressor protein
• need to consider the possibility for regulation on both levels of protein synthesis

Possible further modifications to these transcription factors include the use of different regulation domains,

Involves the consideration of multiple binding sites