Team:BostonU/Temporal Control

Overview Current Methods Our Workflow

Overview

The field of synthetic biology as a whole seeks to engineer desirable cellular functionalities by developing molecular technologies that enable precise genetic manipulation. Controllable gene expression and controllable genome editing are two extremely important areas of current research in synthetic biology. Tightly controlling the activity of proteins that naturally execute genetic modifications can allow researchers to exert temporal control over the fundamental activities and phenotype of a cell at the genetic level.



In the literature, there are several characterized strategies to control protein activity. Different techniques have different advantages and limitations that may make them better suited for particular applications. Here, we focus on a few of these methods and why we ultimately decided to utilize the method of conditional dimerization (a post-translational control mechanism) to split certain genetic manipulation proteins of interest.