Genetic engineering is a powerful approach in producing products like enzymes and is dramatically improving human life quality. However, in the procedure of large-scale industrial production, due to the random distribution of plasmids in the process of bacteria proliferation and division, the bacteria containing less plasmids will gradually become the “slackers”.
There is no efficient way to prevent the birth of plasmid-free bacteria and the applied ways are only limited to the laboratory-use. Generally, we aim to avoid these undesired bacteria become the dominant population. We defined a certain number of plasmids as the threshold and make the bacteria sense and automatically control its plasmid concentration in a single cell.
To achieve this goal, we use the concentration of inhibitor proteins as a signal indicating the plasmid numbers, and it can trigger the downstream reaction by activating the killer gene while the plasmid concentration reduce to the threshold.
Our team divide the experiment into 4 parts as below.
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Basic Circuit
Inhibitor
Killer
Recombination