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Overview Sensitivity Tuner --- Characterisation --- Modelling Colour Generators --- Carotenoids (Orange/Red) --- Melanin (Brown) --- Violacein (Purple/Green) The Future Safety

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Violacein Pigments

Design

The Vio operon had numerous forbidden restriction sites, far too many to remove by PCR. We thus decided to synthesize it. This allowes us too remove these restriction sites and optimize codon usage for E. coli, to create the following biobrick:

As DNA2.0 very generously agreed to synthesize the entire operon for us, we designed it to include all the five genes, each preceded by a ribosome binding site, and flanked by the prefix and suffix. The final plan for the inserted operon is shown below:

This will be held under a repressible promoter on the pJexpress cloning cassette from DNA2.0. We designed it to include restriction sites with complementary sticky ends around vioD and vioC. This allowed us to remove both genes easily to create more colours from the vio operon.

Creating colours

Once the violacein biobrick arrived we expressed in in TOP10 E. coli to create the purple pigment. We then carried out two more digests to see if we could create further colours:

• BamHI and BglII = removed vioC and produced a dark green pigment
• BglII and BclI = removed vioD and produced a light green pigment

Both of these new pigments were entered into the registry, along with the whole violacein operon for the purple pigment.