Bryan Hernandez
From OpenWetWare
Projects
Construction and Characterization of Riboregulators
A Riboregulator is a post-transcriptional regulator used in bacteria. Its mechanism for regulation involves the occlusion of the Ribosome via a hairpin on the mRNA transcript in the 'off' state thereby preventing (or 'locking') translation of the ORF. The 'on' state is recovered by introducing a complementary sequence (or 'key') that disrupts the hairpin on the mRNA transcript allowing the Ribosome to bind and initiate translation. To learn more, go here.
- Our project was to create an addressable cell-to-cell communication mechanism in e. coli.
The Sortostat is a microfluidic chemostat integrated with a cell sorter. My project consists of demonstrating the sortostat's chemostat functionality, a technique rarely seen in microfluidics.
Immediate Goals
- Debug all engineering-related problems with sortostat.
- Demonstrate Sortostat's ability to attain chemostasis in a population of E. Coli.
- Demonstrate Sortostat's ability to sort two phenotypically different populations of E. Coli. In this case, I will be using a mixture of E. Coli expressing CFP and YFP.
- Demostrate Sortostat's ability to select for an arbitrary population of cells that are phenotypically different from others and maintain this population at a steady state.
- UROP Proposal
- Chemostat Theory
- Sortostat/Experiments
- Sortostat/Growth Tests
Bio
- I am currently an undergraduate researcher in the Endy Lab at MIT. I am currently building and characterizing orthogonal riboregulators. Learn more about riboregulators and the work I have done here
- MIT Class of 2009; Majoring in Mathematics and Biological Engineering.
