Team:IIT Delhi/Motivation
Motivation
Reconfigurability is a desirable property; think of a sound processing system, which would transform to have an image processing functionality when dealing with audio signals. One might retort that your smartphone already does this work. However, where a smartphone has different hardware components packed compactly into a module, reconfigurable systems dynamically change the pattern of connections. Consider the human brain, for instance, where synaptic connections dynamically grow or shrivel depending upon use and/or demand from the environment. Other biological systems have these properties to certain extent; naturally existing gene regulatory networks that have a dynamic topology. Such a property affords robustness to a system; even in the face of extremities naturally existing gene regulatory networks rearragnge their connections to avoid failure. Thus, it is desirable to have predictable reconfigurability in synthetic circuits. This is the main focus of team iGem IIT Delhi. Keeping this in mind, we have divided the project into two modules; each centred around the idea of reconfigurability. Module I is a tunable oscillator where we can change the frequency of oscillation. Our proposed design focuses on using an optogentic module to achieve control over frequency. While Module I would switch the frequency of oscillation between two non-zero values, Module II implements a toggle switch over an oscillator. Thus, the idea is to be able to kill the oscillations in a manner that the concentration of one of the components stays at a low value, while that for another component stably stays high.
