Team:Groningen/Future

From 2009.igem.org

Labwork

Metals

A large amount of progress has been obtained in the research line of arsenic accumulation, however several other interesting metals (e.g. copper, zinc) had to be abandoned which might provide more more interesting applications. For this to occur the constructs that were abandoned along the way (e.g. SmtA, HmtA) should be finished and characterized. But also for the existing arsenic devices more characterizing can be performed, for example more detailed characterization of the uptake capacity of the transporter. In this project fermentation was used to supply the culture with medium saturated with air in higher amount than can be attained in shake cultures. This was to ensure a higher amount of gas to be available to enter the gas vesicles, for a future project it might be of interest to sparge nitrogen into broth to obtain anaerobic conditions. Anaerobic condition will influence the oxidation state of arsenic, probably having an effect on the uptake efficiency.

Gas vesicles

A nice addition to the gas vesicle cluster would be the removal of the 10 time repeat, which was attempted in our project without succes.

• Removing repeat of GVP
• Nitrogen sparging in fermentation to see the effect of oxidation states of heavy metals
• Use higher concentrations in death assays

Modeling