Kinetic model

In our project different transistor elements are putted together in order to create logic gates and the idea is to chain these gates in order to create complex logic circuits within cells. Because of this chainability of different elements, we have a cascade of reactions which will eventually reach a stationary state. In order to study in depth the behavior of our system we decided to use a kinetic model, where time dependency of the concentration of different species is taken into account explicitly.

Assumptions

A model which is too complex and too detailed can surely describe experimental results with precision, but it is often difficult to interpret and to understand in details. It is therefore useful to come out with the simplest model that can reproduce the system behavior, which can then be understood in details and used to predict new results.

In order to find a simple model which can reproduce experimental results we have to do many simplifications and assumptions over reality. In this section we will try to keep track of the assumptions we made in order to clarify our model. Every assumption is analyzed details: assumptions are generally not uniques, but we will try to justify our choices.

The most important assumption underlying the kinetic model is the fact that the concentration of a given specie does not depends on spatial coordinates, i.e. it is the same in every region of the cell. This assumption is quite strong but it's a common approach in the literature and usually gives good results. Note however that within a cell the validity of concentration idea itself can be doubtful, since the number of molecules can be small and since these molecules can be localized to membranes or particular organels; in these cases it is necessary to consider the stochastic behavior of individual trajectories rather than global averages [1].

A challenging problem we faced to build our model concerns kinetic constants. Since dCas9 is a newly discovered gene regulation technology [2], gRNA/dCas9 and gRNA+dCas9/DNA binding/unbinding kinetic is still under investigation. It is easy to imagine that binding/unbinding constants depend (at least sligthly) on the gRNA sequence because of the different chemical properties of nucleotides. However, we will consider that these binding/unbinding constants are gRNA-independent. For the gRNA/dCas9 interaction, this assumption is justified by the fact that the gRNA scaffold is always the same. For the gRNA+dCas9/DNA interaction we can justify this hypothesis by thinking of an average nucleotide composition, as our synthetic sequences are generated at random.

dCas9 degradation is a fundamental process in our system: high levels of dCas9 within the cell are toxic [3], thus a continuous change in dCas9 population is needed to propagate the signal from one gate to another (remember, the output of a gate is a gRNA which will bound to a free dCas9 in order to propagate the signal to the next gate). We can imagine three different ways of gRNA/dCas9 complex degradation: the degradation of the whole complex, degradation of the dCas9 leaving the gRNA and the degradation of the targeting sequence of the gRNA leaving a non-functional but occupied dCas9. Since the unbinding probability of gRNAs from dCas9 proteins is extremely low [4] (we therefore neglect this unbinding), we consider only the degradation of the whole complex; in addition we assume that this degradation rate is the same of the dCas9 not bound to a gRNA.

Summary

• Concentrations depends only on time
• dCas9 binding/unbinging is gRNA-independent
• gRNAs does not unbind from dCas9
• gRNA/dCas9 is degraded as a complex, whit the same rate as dCas9 alone

Constants

Equations

Writing down the large set of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) governing our system is a nontrivial and error prone process. When the number of species present is low, doing it by hand and double check the equations can be sufficient. However, when the number of transistors composing our system increases (many chained gates), keeping track of all gRNAs and their promoting/inhibiting interaction with DNA (when bound to dCas9) become almost impossible. For this reason we created a Python program which does the dirty job for us (see the Software section): it is sufficient to input the circuit structure (gates with input/outputs) and the program automatically generate the kinetic model, writing it in LaTeX format and creating a Python function representing our system of ODEs, which can be solved numerically in a second time.

Activation

Our activation model consists in a simple transistor that takes as an input a gRNA/dCas9 complex (input A) and produces an output gRNA (output C). The gRNA/dCas9 complex enhances the production of the output C, which is otherwise produced basally. Experimentally, the output C is used to enhance the production of GFP, in order to quantitatively measure the activation (with respect to the basal expression).

Inhibition

Our activation model consists in a simple transistor that takes as an input a gRNA/dCas9 complex (input A) and produces an output gRNA (output C). The gRNA/dCas9 complex inhibits the production of the output C, which is otherwise produced basally. Experimentally, the output C is used to enhance the production of GFP, in order to quantitatively measure the inhibition (with respect to the basal expression).

Activation and inhibition

Double inhibition

Activation and double inhubition

\[ f(a) = \frac{1}{2\pi i}\oint_\gamma \frac{f(z)}{z-a}dz \]

Simulation

References

[1] R. Phillips et al., Physical Biology of the Cell, Second Edition, Garland Science, 2013.

[2] L. S. Qi et al., Repurposing CRISPR as an RNA-Guided Platform for Sequence-Specific Control of Gene Expression, Cell 152, 1173–1183, 2013.

[3]

[4]