IIT Madras

This is the second time that IIT Madras has sent a team to iGEM. Our team in iGEM 08, the only team to represent India in the competition that year, won the “Best Foundational advance” award, the "Best New Biobrick" award and a Silver, for their work on hybrid promoters which have now been added under the category of promoters (IIT Madras Stresskit promoters). This year, the team is composed of 9 Undergraduates, all from the Department of Biotechnology. We hope to go one step better this year with our design of a combinatorial lock system, and thereby set the standard for future competitions.

Our Project this year is titled PLASMID which stands for Plasmid Locking Assembly for Sustaining Multiple Inserted DNA. This project is based on the principle of Plasmid loss in Bacterial cells. Normally cells will tend to lose plasmids if there is no selection pressure for maintaining the plasmid. We will be developing genetic circuits in the cells to direct Plasmid Loss in a regulated fashion. We will finally perform "Proof of principle" experiments to check our hypothesis of directed plasmid loss in presence of the pre-defined selection pressures.

Abstract: Any episome introduced into the cell shows a segregational asymmetry accompanied with differential growth rates in the absence and presence of episome leading to an overall loss of the episomal unit in the absence of any selective pressure. We have designed a new versatile system which can maintain any given plasmid DNA in E.coli by using user defined selection pressures, limited only by the presence of a response element to said pressure, such as most antibiotics, certain chemical and physical conditions. Depending on this selection pressure, a custom plasmid retaining system can be designed and co-transformed along with the plasmid of interest which will maintain this plasmid. A similar system can be used to “lock up” the function of a certain gene of interest, thus functioning as a combination lock, which is unlocked only when the cultures are grown in a pre-determined order of external selection pressures. In principle, using this locking system, a large number of plasmids can be maintained using a single selection pressure instead of all the selection pressures required to maintain each individual plasmid. Directed evolution, inter-species symbioses are applications that illustrate our plasmid protection system as a powerful tool for a wide range of functions.

Take a look into our detailed design documents to know more about the project, the PLASMID.

Our team consists of 9 Undergraduate students from IIT Madras. To know more about us, look at our Team.

Browse through our Experimental Notebook to read our experimental data.