A set of insulation design principles suitable for the original nuclear transcription control elements.

On July 3rd, a team of researchers and co-authors from the Institute of Microbiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences published a research paper online in the journal Nature Communications entitled Insulated Communication Elements Enable Design Design of Genetic Circuits.
they developed a set of insulation design principles that are generally suitable for the original nuclear transcription control elements.
This set of insulation design principles, which are generally suitable for pro-nuclear transcription control elements, eliminates the functional interference effects between the core components of the gene transcription process, the promoter and operator, through insulation processing, significantly improving their modular properties and predictability of the assembly process, thus enabling the entire process of computer-aided design and virtual optimization at the biological genetic level for the first time.
the results greatly simplify the design process of artificial gene regulation network and lay an important technical foundation for the rational design of artificial life system.
and operators are the core components of transcription regulation.
promoters are responsible for recruiting RNA polymerases to initiate transcription processes, and operators control the ups and downs of promoter activity by recruiting transcription factors to integrate and regulate the flow of gene expression information.
Gene expression regulation is the basis of important life activities such as cell growth, metabolism and differentiation, so the design of a promoter-operator transcription control system to meet the target function is an important cornerstone for the construction of high-performance gene network.
in the natural transcription control system, there are complex interactions between the starter and the operator, making it difficult to replace and debug independently.
The team obtained two types of promoters with modular potential through quantitative testing of components, and determined the sequence boundary between the promoter and operator by identifying the minimum promoter functional sequence area, on the other hand, the researchers identified and removed the spontaneous transcription activity of the operators from the internal combination, thus further insulating the promoters and operators from each other.
, based on the results of accurate quantitative experiments, the researchers proposed a theoretical framework for parameterizing the above-mentioned gene regulatory elements (Figure 1).
Using the above-mentioned insulated 53 starters and 36 operators as the base component library, the researchers tested 127 "non-gate" genes in all 1908 possible combinations, and the results of the experiment were highly consistent with theoretical predictions (R2 x 0.95) showing that the starter design using the insulated element was highly predictable (Figure 2).
To further demonstrate the universality of insulation design principles, the researchers designed a complex incoherent feed forward circuit circuit( IFFL) and used computers to select all parametric starters and operating sub-components for experimental testing, showing that the resulting gene network was 10 times more powerful than similar networks, and that all component combinations could be predicted by theoretical models.
these results fully reflect the practicality and universality of the insulation design principle.
and application of this research result will effectively promote the research process of artificially constructing life system, and then meet people's high-level needs in health, medical, environmental, food and other fields.
Zong Nightingqing, Ph.D., Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Zhang Haoqian, Ph.D., Peking University, were co-authors
the study was funded by projects such as the National Fund Commission and the Ministry of Science and Technology's "973".
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