Tuning an activator-repressor clock employing retroactivity

摘要

Activator-repressor systems have been shown tobe capable of oscillations and are therefore an important clockmotif in the field of Synthetic and Systems Biology. In this paper,we propose a method to regulate oscillatory behavior in suchsystems by the addition of DNA binding sites for the proteinsinvolved in the clock network. We show that the retroactivityeffect caused by this addition can effectively change the relativetimescales among the protein dynamics and impact the behaviorof the clock. We also employ root locus analysis to obtain agraphical interpretation of the results.