IGEM:Paris Bettencourt 2012/Notebooks/modularity group/transfer experiment

To quantify the robustness of our system, we wanted to quantify of the spreading of genes. We are now designing an experiement used to quantify gene transfer and/or containment. the idea is to have a plot looking like the figure.

It is based on tatiana and Julien experiments.

In fact, to do gene transfer in bacterias, we know 4 ways:

Nanotubes: File:Https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/sitnflash wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/nanotube figure.jpg

Conjugation. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/Conjugation.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacterial_conjugation In conjugation, bacterial cells actually connect, and the "male" donates a piece of DNA to the "female." The piece of DNA in this case was excised earlier from the bacterial chromosome.

Transformation. Here pieces of genetic instructions are released by a bacterium into its environment. Another bacterium, not necessarily of the same strain, picks up the DNA and incorporates it into its own genome. one of our issues is that Ecoli is not a good donnor (SOURCE)

In transduction, a virus takes up a piece of DNA from its bacterial host and incorporates it into its own viral genome. After the virus has multiplied, many copies of the virus erupt from the infected cell. Depending on the kind of transduction, some or all of the daughter viruses take copies of parts of the bacterial DNA with them. When one of them infects a new cell, it inserts the stolen DNA into the new cell, where the stolen piece becomes integrated into the new cell's DNA. (The stolen piece may be a whole gene with which the cell acquires a new function, as was reported in June, 1996, by two scientists at Harvard Medical School (5).

We decide to: not base our experiment on nanotube exchanges: Because this is a too fresh idea. not base our experiment on transduction because we don't want to have to deal with phages. But to :

so.... B subtilis is a good candidate.

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