To design the pattern of the pattern of the pattern of the animal body.

Pattern formation is essential in the development of animals and plants. The central problem in the formation of patterns is how to translate the genetic information into a reliable way to get the specific spatial pattern of cell differentiation.

The stripes formed by the French national flag model are a classic example of developmental biology. Cell differentiation, represented by different colors of the French national flag, is caused by a gradient of signal molecules (morphology), i.e., in high, medium and low concentrations of the morphology of the "blue", "white" or "red" gene stripes are activated, respectively. How cellular gene regulatory networks (GRNS) respond to morphogenesis, in a concentration dependent manner, is a key issue in developmental biology. Synthetic biology is a promising new tool to construct the function and performance of the genetic engineering regulatory network (GRNS) from the first principle. This research developed a synthetic biology approach to establish some basic mechanisms behind the formation of the fringes.

In previous studies, and the behaviour of the predefined gene circuit was successfully constructed and model, but most of them on a case by case basis. In this study, published in nature, researchers at the EMBL / CRG systems biology research group, beyond the individual network, and to investigate the computational and synthetic mechanisms of the two sides in a complete set of 3 nodes that form a network of Escherichia coli. The approach combines experimental synthetic biology, led by Mark Isalan, and is now the head of the life sciences department and computational modeling of the, ICREA, Professor of research at the Imperial College London, and the, and in the head of the CRG multicellular systems biology laboratory.

"We have carried out very innovative and ambitious research: we have used a three step approach to effectively explore and create a successful synthetic gene circuit we created a theoretical framework for the detailed study of GRNS" - 2800 of the one hundred thousand version of the network is simulated by computer. Then, we successfully developed a synthetic network engineering system, and finally, we determined all the new experimental data to fit it with a single mathematical model, explained: "the corresponding author James Sharp.

First, Andrea Munteanu, co-author of the study, theory on the screen was found to produce desired behavior (formation of striation morphology gradient) all kinds of design. In this step, she found 4 fundamental - different mechanisms to form the stripes. Then, Yolanda Schaerli, first author of the study and successfully show the four network is the function through establish their in the bacterium Escherichia coli using the tools of synthetic biology. The third step is to validate the different mechanisms by fitting all experimental data to a mathematical model.

The success of this process allows the researchers to take a step to the formation of a deeper level of the design principles. They identified a simple network of 2 nodes - where the Striped gene is directly activated by both activation and inhibition from the morphology of the sensor gene - i.e., replication in its simplest form of stripe formation ability to control. They succeed in building the prototype of a stripe forming network, and eventually find that it can even display an "anti - Striped" phenotype.

"The combination of detailed computational modeling and synthetic biology is more efficient and more powerful than the establishment of a network of networks," said Mark Isalan, author of the. "Our approach provides synthetic biology as a novel and fast diet - a new science discipline that is designed to design a variety of useful biological systems".

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