Talk:CH391L/S13/Mechanosensing

• Jeffrey E. Barrick 11:33, 24 April 2013 (EDT):It's really odd that the lac promoter is induced by pressure. It seems almost too good to be true. Has anyone ever done a high-throughput screen of microbial promoters to see what other ones are induced by high pressure?
  • Max E. Rubinson 17:19, 25 April 2013 (EDT): Like this?
  • Kevin Baldridge 14:24, 29 April 2013 (EDT):Thanks Max! I added a little bit about that paper under transcriptional responses in prokaryotes section
• Dwight Tyler Fields 17:38, 25 April 2013 (EDT): The application you mention of cleaning up deep water oil spills is interesting. So you mean the cells would be activated by deep water? I'm having trouble visualizing how this would work, since oceanic oil spills can generally only be "processed" for cleanup once they've settled on the surface. Can you elaborate, and/or do you have a link to the source?
  • Kevin Baldridge 14:24, 29 April 2013 (EDT):As far as I know, there is no source related to that idea. It's one I had for the final project related to mechanosensing, which we chose not to pursue. It would be specifically intended for the deep water horizon situation, where the oil sat on the surface for a while then sank back down to the bottom before it was cleaned up all the way. This idea would basically be that a bacterium would have three major components: a digestion pathway for oil spill components that is activated only under high pressure, a suicide switch under control of pressure-dependent repressor (one that would repress under high pressures but allow transcription under normal pressures) that would prevent the bacteria from leaving the deep biosphere, and lastly a genetic killswitch that would be activated when the carbon source (oil gunk) ran out and produce an auto-toxin to kill the cells after they've done their work.