Team:Marburg/Modeling/Outlook
SynDustry Fuse. Produce. Use.
Quantitative evolutionary stability analysis of kill switches
We have shown that a well-designed kill switch can out-compete a simple design in terms of evolutionary stability even though it might introduce additional complexity to the kill switch construct. However, this depends on the topological details and is no general statement, yet. Using further abstract kill switch topologies, optimizing for the critical kill switch topology suggests itself. This follows the famous quote "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler" [1]: Design guidelines for minimal kill switch topology complexity and a maximal evolutionary stability is crucial for all real-life applications of kill switches. Our tool provides opportunities to tackle this question.
Studying kill switch designs at hand and leaving the search for general guidelines is very useful for the particular application. This can help characterizing already existing or planned projects and quantify their safety concerns. Thus, the tool is not only interesting for future iGEM teams but also applications beyond iGEM.
Integrating the results about evolutionary stability in the database is another step to a great kill switch documentation that is not available in iGEM until now.
Small modifications of the framework enable to use the tool to quantify evolutionary stability of other constructs than kill switches only. Since all constructs suffer from mutations, this is an essential question for everybody building biological constructs.
Finally, we think that our tool is useful for future scientists – in iGEM and beyond. More potential projects, further information and other scientific exchange is welcome (Martin Lellep, martin.lellep@physik.uni-marburg.de).
