Team:CIDEB-UANL Mexico/Math-Overview

Deterministic model
Our deterministic model represents the change in time of the concentrations of mRNAs and their corresponding proteins. It assumes that the variables behave continuously and obey kinetic rules that can be represented by constants. We are aware that, in practice, the components and variables in the model may not fall under the assumptions of a deterministic model and that there is always the chance that noise effects are being grossly underestimated; however, we propose this model as a general framework for thermoregulator modeling, upon which further work can be done.

Our genetic system is composed by two parts, each one placed in different vectors: the first in the plasmid 2-4B C/C, consists of the transcription factor cI (c0051) under the regulation of a promoter with a riboswitch ( J23100 and k115017 ) that can be activated or repressed depending on the temperature; we call this our “thermosensor”. We found this piece in the iGEM TUDelf-2008 Team and saw we could use it because of its specific translation temperature at 32ºC. The second part located in the vector 2-6B K/K consist of two genes -the insecticide protein Vip3Ca3 and the green fluorescent protein, (GFP); both are under the regulation of cI.

The thermosensor is repressed when the temperature is below 32°C, it does not translate because the mRNA takes a secondary structure just as the image below and cannot enter the ribosome for translation; when the temperatures reaches a range between 32°C and 37°C, the thermosensor is activated, the mRNA unfolds into a straight structure that now have access to the ribosome, start translation, be passed to aminoacids and form a protein .

cI (c0051) is a gene that constitutively represses the promoter r0051. Once our promoter isn't affected by the cI(c0051), the promoter is activated once the production of Vip3Ac3 and GFP started. This means that a range below 32°C to 37°C enables the production of the Vip and GFP.