Team:William and Mary/Results
Results
Construction of an Abstract IFFL Model:
Based on our understanding that incoherent feedforward loops (IFFL) could serve as temporal distinguishers, the first goal of our project was to replicate the model from Zhang, et al. (2016)[1]. We constructed an abstract kinetics based IFFL model, and found that IFFLs are indeed temporal classifiers. We found that when an IFFL was given an oscillatory input signal it will give qualitatively different outputs depending on the length input signals (Figure 1). In the presence of long input signals, an IFFL will give output pulses of a fixed height, whereas in the presence of shorter input signals it will produce a staircase like output where the output concentration increases with each new input pulse.
Figure 1: The results from our abstract IFFL model. When inputs are long (left), reporter concentration pulses at a fixed height in response to each input. When input lengths are shorter than the threshold time, each input pulse will generate a stepwise increase whose size is determined by pulse time.