Team:Wash U

Project

Our goal for this project is to increase photosynthetic efficiency in the purple bacterium Rhodobacter Sphaeroides by altering the regulation of the light harvesting antenna LH2. This antenna complex surrounds and harvests photons for the reaction center, where light energy is converted to chemical energy. We plan to utilize a synthetic light sensing system that will result in an output of a low number of LH2 complexes at high light intensities and a greater number of LH2 complexes at low light intensities. This project is intended to serve as a proof in principle that light harvesting antenna sizes may be synthetically and dynamically tailored to incidental light intensity in order to increase photosynthetic efficiency in a bioreactor. As much of the world turns to alternative energy in the form of biofuels, photosynthetic efficiency becomes immensely important. And while individual cells have become very efficient over time due to evolution, large cell cultures perform poorly in bioreactors. This is because cells near the light source absorb as much light as possible, more than they can convert to chemical energy, leaving cells behind them with almost no light. Finding a way to limit the amount of light each cell can absorb (below the cell's saturation point) would greatly increase the efficiency of the culture as a whole and enable more biofuels to be produced per reactor. To learn more about our project, please click here.

What Is iGEM?

The International Genetically Engineered Machine competition (iGEM) is the premiere undergraduate Synthetic Biology competition. Student teams are given a kit of biological parts at the beginning of the summer from the [http://partsregistry.org/Main_Page Registry of Standard Biological Parts]. Working at their own schools over the summer, they use these parts and new parts of their own design to build biological systems and operate them in living cells.
The burgeoning field of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_biology Synthetic Biology] is the culmination of the previous thirty years of research into recombinant DNA and biological engineering technology. It is fundamentally about the union of biology and engineering, thereby encouraging the collaboration of geneticists, molecular biologists, biochemists, and biomedical, chemical, and computer science engineers. Researchers in this field mainly seek to A) design and construct new biological parts, devices and systems or B) re-design existing, natural biological systems for useful purposes.

Contact

Please feel free to contact us with any questions or concerns at washu.igem@gmail.com
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