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Chapter 3
Dynamics of Multicellular Synthetic Gene Networks
Ekkehard Ullner 1;2;9 , Aneta Koseska 3 , Alexey Zaikin 4;5 , Evgenii Volkov 6 ,
Jurgen Kurths 7;8;9 , Jordi Garca-Ojalvo 1
1 Departament de Fsica i Enginyeria Nuclear, Universitat Politecnica de
Catalunya, Colom 11, E{08222 Terrassa, Spain
2 Institute for Complex Systems and Mathematical Biology, Kings College,
University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen AB24 3UE, UK
3 Center for Dynamics of Complex Systems, University of Potsdam,
D{14469 Potsdam, Germany
4 Department of Mathematics, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park,
Colchester C04 3SQ, UK
5 Department of Mathematics & Institute for Women's Health,
University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK
6 Department of Theoretical Physics, Lebedev Physical Inst.,
Leninskii 53, Moscow, Russia
7 Institute of Physics, Humboldt University Berlin, D-10099 Berlin, Germany
8 Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, D-14412 Potsdam, Germany
9 Institute of Medical Sciences, Foresterhill, University of Aberdeen,
Aberdeen AB25 2ZD, UK
3.1. Introduction
Living systems are driven by intricate networks of genes and proteins, whose dy-
namical behavior underlies all kinds of structural and functional processes in cells.
Understanding the dynamics that emerges from such complex networks has bene-
ted greatly in recent years by synthetic approaches, through which simpler network
modules have been built that perform natural-like dynamical processes without in-
terfering with, nor being perturbed by, natural cellular processes [for a review, see
e.g. Sprinzak and Elowitz (2005)].
One of the rst examples of an articial gene circuit was the repressilator, a
synthetic biological oscillator developed in E. coli from a network of three tran-
scriptional repressors that inhibit one another in a cyclic way [Elowitz and Leibler
(2000)]. Spontaneous oscillations were initially observed in individual cells within
a growing culture, although substantial variability and noise was present among
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