Synthetic Oscillatory Networks of Transcriptional Regulators
First published: 2000
Brief summary
Landmark repressilator paper showing an engineered genetic oscillator in living cells.
Article
The study constructed a synthetic genetic oscillator in Escherichia coli to investigate how networks of interacting regulatory molecules can generate dynamic behaviour. The network was assembled from three transcriptional repressors that were not components of a natural biological clock.
Each repressor inhibited production of the next repressor in a closed ring. This arrangement created delayed negative feedback, and green fluorescent protein was used as a reporter so that changes in the oscillator’s state could be followed in individual bacterial cells.
The engineered network, named the repressilator, produced repeated oscillations with periods of several hours. These periods were longer than the bacterial cell-division cycle, showing that the oscillator’s state could be transmitted from one generation of cells to the next.
The oscillations varied in amplitude and timing and were described as noisy, consistent with stochastic fluctuations in the small numbers of molecular components involved. The experiment demonstrated that defined regulatory circuits can be designed to produce new cellular behaviours and can be used to test principles of natural biochemical networks.
Source details and credits
- Source / publisher: Nature
- Source type: Research article
- URL type: WWW
- Credits: Nature
- URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/35002125