Periodic Switching in a Recombinase-Based Molecular Circuit
Christian Cuba Samaniego (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Arizona State University)
Giulia Giordano (TU Delft - Team Tamas Keviczky)
Elisa Franco (University of California)
More Info
expand_more
Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.
Abstract
An important challenge in synthetic biology is the construction of periodic circuits with tunable and predictable period. We propose a general architecture, based on the use of recombinase proteins and negative feedback, to build a molecular device for periodic switching between two distinct regimes; the switching rule depends on known concentration thresholds for some circuit components. We analytically characterize the threshold values for which a periodic orbit is guaranteed to exist and attract all trajectories with initial conditions within an invariant set, and we provide expressions for period and amplitude. We describe two distinct biological realizations of the recombinase architecture, and show their capacity to exhibit periodic behaviors via extensive numerical simulations.