Team:Heidelberg

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Project abstract

Early efforts in synthetic biology have focused on using prokaryotes as an engineering chassis, whereas novel developments indicate a shift towards an eukaryotic synthetic biology. The value of eukaryotic synthetic biology is manifold: in medical research, it will accomplish new ways of gene therapy; in plant biotechnology, it can contribute to the struggle for a sustainable food and energy solution. Finally, the ability to assemble and analyze complicated biological systems step by step will allow a revolutionary approach to fundamental research.

Establishing new standards for iGEM, the Heidelberg 2009 team will be concerned with developing ways for measuring promoters in mammalian cells, a default chassis and a first evaluation of the recently postulated BioBrick beta proposal 2 (Tom Knight). Considering the importance of controlling gene expression, our team's work will focus on natural and synthetic mammalian promoters. Our vision is to provide the synthetic biology community with a methodical library of such promoters (with different output strength and sensitivity to different regulatory proteins) and a model which can provide guidance for the development of further synthetic promoters. Our efforts will therefore, from the very beginning, equally entail bioinformatics and wet lab work. As an early application for such a promoter library, our team will attempt to develop an assay which can monitor the activity of several pathways in one cell. Such an assay is of high value for biological research as it can be applied for studying stem cell differentiation, tumor formation, apoptosis and autophagy as well as drug response. Our team will apply the assay towards testing several anti-cancer drugs. A computer-based model will lay the foundations for future work. It will help us to build a logic that integrates the promoter activities and will allow us to predict the possibilities of a single functional output.