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Design

Speed control is a crucial feature of our Bactomotor and an indispensable feature for more advanced controllable applications. Devices equipped with the speed controllable Bactomotor open up possibilities of non-invasive micro-surgery. Obviously, we may not expect the bacteria motor to behave exactly according to our will. After all, our motor is alive! It is subjected to numerous physical and physiological limitations! But the capacity of speed control greatly increases its usefulness. In the case of micro-surgery, we can slow down the Bactomotor in order to locate the pathologic tissue. We can then increase the bacteria to its full speed to bring desirable mechanical changes to the target area.

 Another example that will illustrate the importance of speed control is in the case of drug delivery. On one hand, we may wish to make the drug-loaded to swim faster than it normally does to overcome the resistance it encounters with in the capilliaries during the process of delivery; on the other hand, we wish to slow down the Bactomotor to allow more accurate localization of drug. 

E. coli or Salmonella can swim around by rotating the flagella. When the flagella rotate in a counterclockwise fashion, the bactomotor gathers impetus and produce non-random locomotion. When the rotation is in the clockwise direction, the bactomotor will tumble in place and fail to 'swim' (Fig 1).

Fig. 1 Genetic circuit related to cell movement iHKU

To control the speed of our Bactomotor, we aim at the direct swimming of bacteria for propelling the motor and the adjustable speed of swimming within a certain range. The aim is achieved by regulation of the expression level of cheZ gene. cheZ plays the key role here is due to its influence on the expression of cheY. A high level phosphorylation of cheY protein in E. coli or Salmonella leads to the majority of bacteria tumbling movement, while a low level of phosphorylation of cheY protein in E. coli or Salmonella is found in non-tumbling bacteria and cheZ can function to reduce the level of phophorylated cheY in the bacteria. Therefore, when increasing the expression level of CheZ gene, we can reduce the tumbling movement, which in turn can increase the swimming speed of the bacteria to achieve the manipulation of speed.

Step 1--CheZ knockout

By using lamda red system, recombineering is utilized to knock out the CheZ gene in the chromosome of E. coli or Salmonella. Homologous arms (about 50bp) were placed inside the CheZ gene. After recombination, the CheZ gene was replaced by a chloramphenicol resistance gene.

Step 2--Controllable cheZ expression

An inducible cheZ plasmid was tranformed into CheZ knockout strains. Therefore, by controlling cheZ expression level, we can implement the adjustable control over the speed of the bacteria and hence the motor.

There are two designs for cheZ plasmid.

Original Design

The orinigal design is to use lacI as a repressor to prevent any leaky expression in the absence of the inducer (IPTG or arabinose). When the bacteria are treated with IPTG or arabinose(switch on), the cheZ expression level could be regulated according to its concentration and hence the swimming speed of the bacteria.

Back up Design

The back up design is to use tetR as a repressor and ptet as the regulator, which can be induced by aTc. We suppose that by changing the concentration of aTc, the expression amount of protein cheZ will be altered, which results in the speed up and slow down of the swimmng.