Team:Groningen/Future

From 2009.igem.org

Labwork

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 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, e.g. more detailed characterization of the uptake capacity of the transporter (using higher metal concentrations in death assays). 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. A nice addition to the gas vesicle cluster would be the removal of the 10 time repeat, which was attempted in our project without success.

Modeling