Team:British Columbia/Project

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Revision as of 02:48, 22 October 2009

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:

The E. coli Traffic Light Biosensor is composed of three major subparts: variable arabinose-inducible promoters, RNA lock and key system, and reverse antisense promoters for input detection, color activation and traffic light switching respectively.

Here is a more detailed design of our project.

Schematic black-box representation of the E. coli Biosensor that detects various concentration inputs and color outputs. The idea is discrete analog outputs based on a user-specified threshold for each range of concentration.

Please go to the sub pages for more information on the subparts:
1. A variable sensitivity biosensor
2. A lock-and-key logic gate system]
3. An antisense "off" switch

Miscellaneous Data

We also produced a couple tools to help out the project:

Biobricks.zip - Fasta file containing every biobrick from [http://partsregistry.org/cgi/partsdb/pgroup.cgi?pgroup=List Here]

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.

Links

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

@@ Line 8: / Line 8: @@
 [[Image:E_coli_Traffic_Light_Subprojects.png|center|thumb||400px|The ''E. coli'' Traffic Light Biosensor is composed of three major subparts: variable arabinose-inducible promoters, RNA lock and key system, and reverse antisense promoters for input detection, color activation and traffic light switching respectively.]]
-Here is the design for how we can build our "traffic light".
+Here is a more detailed design of our project.
 [[Image:E_coli_Traffic_Light_Step_by_Step.png|thumb|center|700px|Schematic black-box representation of the E. coli Biosensor that detects various concentration inputs and color outputs. The idea is discrete analog outputs based on a user-specified threshold for each range of concentration.]]