Engineering Tuneable Gene Circuits in Yeast

Doctoral Thesis / Dissertation from the year 2011 in the subject Chemistry - Bio-chemistry, grade: pass, University of Manchester (Manchester Institute of Biotechnology), course: Systems biology doctoral training program -synthetic biology, language: English, abstract: Synthetic biology is an emergent field incorporating aspects of computer science, molecular biology-based methodologies in a systems biology context, taking naturally occurring cellular systems, pathways, and molecules, and selectively engineering them for the generation of novel or beneficial synthetic behaviour. This study described the construction of a novel synthetic gene circuit with interchangeable gene expression components enabling the investigation of tuning circuits for optimal signal to noise ratio. The circuit utilises the inducible downstream transcriptional activation properties of the pheromone-response pathway in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae as the basis for initiation.