Team:Davidson-Missouri Western/Project

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Our multidisciplinary team conducted a project that drew expertise from biology and mathematics to explore the possibility of designing, modeling, constructing, and testing logic gates that would enable bacteria to compute a hash function.  The links below provide documentation of the diverse outcomes of our research, illustrating not only the feasibility of bacterial computation but the ability of undergraduates students to contribute to an important emerging field.
Our multidisciplinary team conducted a project that drew expertise from biology and mathematics to explore the possibility of designing, modeling, constructing, and testing logic gates that would enable bacteria to compute a hash function.  The links below provide documentation of the diverse outcomes of our research, illustrating not only the feasibility of bacterial computation but the ability of undergraduates students to contribute to an important emerging field.
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=='''Cryptographic Hash Functions'''==
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A cryptographic hash function takes as input a message or document of any size, and returns a fixed length hexadecimal string as output, called the '''hash value'''. The current widely-held standard is called '''MD-5'''.  The hash value is essentially the "digital signature" of the input document, and can be used in many cases to determine if a document has been tampered with. The hash function should be sensitive to small perturbations in the input message, producing very different hash values for highly similar, but not identical, documents.  The following bullet points and images illustrate the characteristics of a cryptographic hash function.
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[[Team:Davidson-Missouri_Western/Ideal Hash Function Characteristics|What is a Hash Function?]]
[[Team:Davidson-Missouri_Western/Ideal Hash Function Characteristics|What is a Hash Function?]]

Revision as of 01:24, 30 October 2008

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E. nigma Project Parts Submitted to the Registry Notebook

E. nigma Project Overview: Using E. coli to compute values of a cryptographic hash function

A recent article about cryptographic hash functions challenged the world to create a better hash function, an algorithm that produces a digital fingerprint of a digitized message. We decided to work toward the design and construction of a bacterial hash function. To this end, we designed and constructed several novel dually-regulated hybrid promoters, crucial new elements in the genetic circuitry we designed to function as biological XOR gates. These gates produce a positive result in the presence of exactly one input and a negative result otherwise and can be put in sequence to create a bacterial hash function. The name of the project is a play on the name of the World War II coding machine used to encrypt military secrets.

Our multidisciplinary team conducted a project that drew expertise from biology and mathematics to explore the possibility of designing, modeling, constructing, and testing logic gates that would enable bacteria to compute a hash function. The links below provide documentation of the diverse outcomes of our research, illustrating not only the feasibility of bacterial computation but the ability of undergraduates students to contribute to an important emerging field.

Cryptographic Hash Functions

A cryptographic hash function takes as input a message or document of any size, and returns a fixed length hexadecimal string as output, called the hash value. The current widely-held standard is called MD-5. The hash value is essentially the "digital signature" of the input document, and can be used in many cases to determine if a document has been tampered with. The hash function should be sensitive to small perturbations in the input message, producing very different hash values for highly similar, but not identical, documents. The following bullet points and images illustrate the characteristics of a cryptographic hash function.


What is a Hash Function?

Hash functions and biological systems

Our Models

Analysis of our Models

Matlab files

Future work

Define XOR logic gates and how it was used with biological inputs and outputs

XOR and Autoinducers

Describe different design architectures

DNA Encoded XOR Gates


Describe cellular communication systems used

Cellular Communication Systems

[http://partsregistry.org/cgi/partsdb/pgroup.cgi?pgroup=iGEM2008&group=Davidson-Missouri_Western parts contributed ]

Constructs tested

Systems for sending and receiving


Discuss need for delayed growth (common problem with many projects in the past)

Time-Delayed Growth ([http://www.bio.davidson.edu/courses/genomics/2008/DeLoache/TimeDelayedWithTimes.mov See the QT Movie])


Present Hybrid Promoter Designs cartoon fashion (3 major different types)

Hybrid Promoters


Show data we have with new parts

Experimental data on XOR gate

Home The Team E. nigma Project Parts Submitted to the Registry Notebook