Outline for AACR fellowship

Based on the section they request and what we want to say.

Abstract

A) Title of Research Project; 

I. Introductory Statement, Background, and Rationale; II.Specific Aims; III.Research Design and Methods

           IV. Significance and Statement of Potential for Clinical Application. 

I. Introductory Statement, Background, and Rationale

• studying aging can give great insights into cancer biology too, as well as other fields.
• the tools people use to study aging, in particular in terms of sorting differentially aged populations are insufficient today:

describe the methods, which result people had with these methods, and comment.

• A lot of exciting discovery just waiting to be made, if we have high precision tools.
• being able to engineer cells that can report their age would be great step...

Questions: is it better to directly focus on cell counting, or to speak more generally on the usefulness of biological memory devices in general and then come to the counter? (I guess #2...)

II.Specific Aims

• we want to built a GE memory device, with a particular application to cell cycle counter.
• We will have an engineering approach, more rationale and thus more succesfull at the end ( soomething like that!?)
• We propose as a goal for the year covered by the fellowship to construct the first bit of memory.

Question: Do we have to take into account the fact that the fellowship begin on July, so that we'll have already progressed, and in this case we should plan a "development schedule" and see where we aim to be at this date.

III.Research Design and Methods

Introduction

• We will use different levels of abstraction (cite references nat biotech?)
• quantitative characterization of all parts and devices.
• We have already specified some performance requirements and chosen some working direction that we think has the best potential of success.
• specific concerns are:
  • Modularity
  • reuseability
  • scalability

Our design will be done following these requirements.

System architecture description

Describe the cell cycle counter in abstract (coupled gated oscillators)

Device architecture description

how the first bit should be designed?

Q: in our case do we need to focus on the particular case of a same imput switching state?

We choose recombinases

• Why?

1/ writing DNA is interesting in terms of specificity, stability, scalability (develop this). 2/we already have a bunch of enzyme nature gave us, which perform a great number of different recombination reaction that we can take advantage. 3/well studied (lambda...), some of them already used in enginerring (Ham) 4/ seems that we can modify specificity and that to some extend there's a kind of modularity we could exploit.

What we gonna do?

in the experimental point of view, directed evolution will probably be widely used, we would need to combine with a throughtput screening method. Selection for enzyme efficiency, specificity, stability....

• different directions (not putting all the eggs in the same basket)

Invertases evolution Integrases

and need to read more