IGEM:IMPERIAL/2007/Projects

Project Description

The Imperial College iGEM 2007 team consists of ten undergraduate students, as well as a number of graduate students and faculty supervisors.The aim of our project is to characterise new chassis with the hope of unlocking new potential in simple constructs. To date, work on synthetic biology has been done using the chassis of bacterial cells. However the use of living, replicating engineered bacteria has severe limitations : in terms of the range of applications possible due to health risk bacteria pose, in terms of the fidelity of systems due to mutations and in terms of the quality of our system response due to poor signal to noise ratio. We Plan to compare and characterise the traditional E. coli chassis with several alternatives : in-vitro chassis composed of E. coli cytoplasmic extracts and 'in-veso' chassis (E. coli cytoplasmic extracts encapsulated in phospholipid vesicles) in the hope that they will be less limiting. To illustrate the benefits of these new non-living cell-free chassis we have two exciting applications in mind. Firstly Cell By Date, a device that determines when food is spoilt more accurately than estimates used to construct printed sell by dates. It acts as a thermal exposure device exploiting the thermal dependence of the rate of expression of a simple reporter system. Our Second application is Infector Detector, a system that detects biofilms on catheters and produces a fluorescent output. Biofilms are a critical problem in hospitals as they cause infections and are resistant to antibiotics. Our Infector Detector makes use of the Lux quorum sensing system to detect AHL secreted by the bacteria constituting a biofilm. This is analogous to eavesdropping on the communication between biofilm-forming bacteria. Through our two applications : Cell By Date and Infector Detector we hope to show that using non-living Cell-Free Chassis we can take a step forward in terms of integrating synthetic biology with our everyday lives in a meaningful, safe way. Our project strategy is based on the engineering cycle, of which we have completed specification and design of the systems. We are starting on modelling and implementation and we aim to test our final constructs in the different chassis for our two fantastic applications.

Project Outlook

Chassis Characterization / Applications	Introduction	In vivo	In vitro	In veso	Basis for Comparison
Biofilm Detector
Cell By Date
Hrp System

Common Resources

DNA Constructs

DNA constructs for all our projects.

General Protocols

Protocols being used by all projects. Examples:

• Plasmid preparation
• Plasmid extraction
• Restriction digest
• Ligation

Reporters

Any reporters that might be used for the projects

Lab Notebook

Follow the link above to the team's lab notebook