All iGEM projects involve modified organisms. When we work with those organisms, the question of confinement is essential to prevent their spreading out of the lab. Even if each team thinks about the best tool to answer this question, our team has decided to think about the worst situations.

What happens when a bacterial population escapes from our test tubes ?

To answer this question, we decided to create a computational simulation model in order to see :

• the number of bacteria that could proliferate on a lab bench
• what percentage of these bacteria would able to maintain their plasmid

The presentation of our work will be done in different sections. First, we are going to explain our approach in choosing a simulation model and our reasons for our choices. In the net section, we will describe how we have created our model and explain its initialization. After, we will explain the equation that we have chosen to modelize the bacteria growth and the plasmid lost. Finally, we will make an assessment of our model, explain how we have validated it and give our perspectives for this project.

1. The multi-agent model

The definition

In informatics, the muti-agent system aims to represent intelligent agents which interact between them in a specific environment. In our case, our agents are bacteria where are dispersed in a corner of the laboratory. They move, growth and are able to do cell division. Some of them have a recombinant plasmid which give them a antibiotic resistance. Our model helps us to know if our bacteria is able to survive on this specific environment and if they can maintain their plasmid in specific conditions.
This model is interesting to use because it modelizes how act the agents in the environment and how interact the environment with the agents.