A new synthetic biology gene circuit regulates blood sugar levels.

A new advance in synthetic biology has been published in the British journal Nature Communications on Thursday: A team of European scientists has devised a new gene circuit for synthetic biology that has been shown to activate it with caffeine.
mouse diabetes model studies have shown that it can successfully regulate blood sugar levels.
the research may help humans fight diabetes, and also demonstrate the potential of synthetic biology in the medical community.
synthetic biology can solve energy, materials, environmental protection and other areas by designing and constructing artificial biological systems that do not exist in nature.
In recent years, the medical community has also experimented with gene therapy and cell therapy based on synthetic gene circuits to regulate blood sugar in the body environment, helping to repair the health of diabetics.
type 2 diabetes accounts for more than 90% of all diabetes patients.
compared to type I diabetes, the ability of type II patients to produce insulin is not completely lost, but is in a relatively deficient state.
type 2 diabetes affects more than 400 million people worldwide and costs a lot of health care.
at present, there is no cure for diabetes, only through a variety of treatment methods to control the development of the disease.
, successful health management requires the ability to monitor blood sugar rise after eating, respond to and control blood sugar levels.
, Martin Fusenegel, a researcher at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, and colleagues studied whether caffeine can be used to induce gene expression to help regulate blood sugar.
team designed a synthetic biology gene circuit, called "Caffeine Stimulation Advanced Regulator" (C-STAR), which responds to caffeine in commercial products and produces a peptide that can be used to treat type 2 diabetes.
experiments showed that in the mouse diabetes model, cells carrying the C-STAR system successfully helped control blood sugar levels after the mice had consumed coffee.
researchers say that while this is only a validation of principles, it shows that genetic circuits in synthetic biology can regulate physical conditions using common compounds, and also shows the potential for future use of synthetic biology in healthcare, promising to minimize lifestyle disruption.
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