Team:EPF-Lausanne/Team

Who we are

We are a team of undergraduates with an interdisiplinary background. Most of us are from the life sciences faculty but some of us are from microengineering, mechanical engineering and chemistry. Group : from left to right : up : Nicolas G, Christian, Gabriela, Tú, Nathalie, Carine, Nicolas D, Rafael, down : Heidi, Sebastian, Caroline, Mélanie Advisors: Bart Deplancke Sebastian Maerkl Matteo Dal Peraro Felix Naef Instructors: Nicolas Dénervaud Carine Gubelmann Undergrads: Christian Adamczyk Caroline Baer Nathalie Brandenberg Nicolas Gobet Mélanie Guittet Heidi Fournier Tú Nguyen Rafael Pennese Gabriela Pregernig Basile Wicky

Where we are from

We are all studying at EPFL aka the Swiss Institute of Technology of Lausanne. The campus is located near the shore of lake Geneva in the surroundings of the city of Lausanne, 50 km away from Geneva.

What we want to do

Light-sensitive proteins can easily be found in nature.

In this project, our aim is to design a fusion/hybrid protein that would allow genetic regulation through light control.

Therefore we are working on cloning strategies that would allow us to fuse natural "wild" light-sensitive domains with regulatory proteins. The idea is to allow transmission of the conformational change induced by light (on the light-sensitive domain) to the DNA-binding domain. This transmitted conformational change would then result in an increase or decrease of the regulatory domain's affinity for the DNA promoter site.

The overal effect would thus be a genetic expression controlled by light!