Team:British Columbia/Project

Traffic Light Overview
Depending on the concentration of a particular substrate in the medium, E. coli will respond accordingly by producing different coloured fluorescence proteins. A diagram would look like this:



Here is what's happening inside our traffic light:



For our ideas to work, we will need: 1. A variable sensitivity biosensor 2. A lock-and-key logic gate system] 3. An antisense "off" switch

Tools used and produced
To assist our project, we produced a Biobrick digestion engine and Biobrick picture maker to help out the project:


 * http://www.pkts.ca/bb - Biobrick digestion engine - enter the name of a biobrick plasmid and biobrick insert, and this will show you the product of an EcoRI and PstI digestion/ligation as a FASTA file (suitable for viewing in your favorite program).
 * http://www.pkts.ca/brickedit/ - Biobrick picture maker - enter a sequence of letters corresponding to the icons, and the program will produce a concatenated file of the Biobrick.

Also, we generated a handy Fasta file containing every biobrick from Here:
 * [[Media:Biobricks.zip|Biobricks.zip]] - Fasta file containing every biobrick

We also found the following tools very helpful:


 * http://rna.tbi.univie.ac.at/ - a package of prediction tools for RNA structures; we used RNAfold to annotate the key and lock structures


 * http://mobyle.pasteur.fr/cgi-bin/portal.py - a set of web-accessible bioinformatics tools including Mfold, which determines 2D RNA structure and draws it


 * http://frodo.wi.mit.edu/ - Primer3, a primer design program