Every relevant substance in the cell is denoted with uppercase
letters which describes the substance, and a subscript which
encodes the scale in which the amount of the substance is
measured by the variable. For example, if we have a substance Y,
its amount inside a single cell is denoted by Y_{in}
its amount inside all the cells together (its total amount
inside the cells) is denoted by Y_{sum}
its amount outside all the cells (its external amount) is
denoted by Y_{out}
2 A list of all the notations we used
Substances:
A
- AHL (The auto inducer, a short for N-Acyl homoserine
lactone).
L - LuxR (a transciptional activator protein)
LA - the complex LuxR and AHL form together.
LA_{2}
- the dimer we get when two LuxR-AHL complexes bind
together.
aa - Aiia (a AHL-lactonase).
a_{1}
- plasmids with an unactivated LuxR promotor.
a_{2}
- plasmids with an activated LuxR promotor.
TRLV -NOTICE IM EMPTY??
b_{1}
- plasmids with an unactivated Tet promotor.
b_{2}
- plasmids with an activated Tet promotor.
ccbd - Toxin we use to kill the cell.
X - any gene we want to measure the amount of it that will be
produced by the bacteria colony. For example, it might represent
the amount of a certain drug the bacteria produce.
Other quantitie of interest:
N - number of bacteria. The bacteria are divided to two groups
N^{+}
- bacteria with our plasmid.
N^{-}
- bacteria without our plasmid (in other words,
bacteria that lost the plasmids we introduced into them).
V - volume of the relevant scale. That means,
V_{out}
- the volume of the space outside the cells.
V_{sum}
- the volume of the total space inside all the cells.
w - width of the cell membrane.
Constants
C1 - C18 - different reaction constants.
T^{+}
- plamid positive generation time.
T^{-}
- plamid free generation time.
p - the chance to loose a plasmid.
D- AHL diffusion constant.
3 Reactions
Initial conditions
-----
AHL_{out}
- how much AHL we put.
a0 - initial number of strands (probably plasmid number).
a1 - 0.
b0 - initial number of strands (probably plasmid number). Sounds
equal to a_{0}(t=0)
.
b1 - 0.
N^{+}
- the number of cells we have at the beginning.
N^{-}
- 0.
all the rest - 0.
Ways to compute things
\alpha^{+}=\frac{1-p}{T^{+}}+\frac{p}{T^{-}}
\mu=1-\frac{ln(2-x)}{ln2}
\alpha^{-}=\frac{2^{\frac{T^{+}}{T^{-}}}-1}{T^{-}}
Sub_{sum}=N^{+}Sub_{in}
V_{out}\sim V_{tot}
Things to talk about
• The way I took into account the plasmid-less bacteria.
• Mistakes in first equation and what used to be the last one.
• Meaningful names.
• RNA transcription. In other places, they replace (5-7) with
this:
\frac{dTRLV}{dt}=
• Validity of the plasmid loss computations.