What Is a Repressilator?

The repressilator is a synthetic circuit that generates, it kind of acts like a little clock inside of a cell. So it generates oscillations in the levels of its own proteins. And so if you kind of start to imagine what that circuit could do, imagine I suddenly have a lot of repressor one, that's going to turn down the expression of repressor two. But with a time delay, and that turns out to be sufficient to give you self-sustaining oscillations as the cell grows and divides.