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Team:Michigan/Project
From 2009.igem.org
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The Toluene TerminatorOverviewThe Toluene Terminator is a Pseudomonas device that aims to identify the toxic compound toluene in an environmental setting (e.g. a spill into soil from an underground petrol tank), move to and uptake it, metabolize it, and destroy itself when all of the toluene has been metabolized. This device will require four basic modules: toluene chemorecognition, chemotaxis, toluene metabolism, and a suicide mechanism. This year we have been working on toluene metabolism and the suicide mechanism. Toluene MetabolismThe goal of this project is to work with the toluene degrading abilities that already exist in P. putida mt-2 (ATCC 33015) on the pWW0-TOL plasmid. The pathway on this plasmid is comprised of the upper pathway where toluene is metabolized into catechol and the lower, meta-pathway where catechol is converted into acetaldehyde and pyruvate. The regulation of toluene degradation on the pWW0 plasmid is presented below.
Upper Pathway
The Pr (regulator) promoter is a constitutive promoter in P. putida mt-2 and expresses the XylR regulator protein. When there is no toluene in the system, the XylR protein acts as a repressor for Pr to prevent leaky expression. When toluene is present, the toluene binds with the XylR regulator protein to create a complex that activates the Pu (upper pathway) promoter and starts to degrade toluene. The upper pathway enzymes XylA, XylB and XylC degrade toluene into catechol. Lower Pathway
The XylR-toluene complex also activates Ps, the promoter that expresses XylS which is the protein that regulates the lower meta-pathway. XylS regulates the lower pathway Pm (meta-pathway) promoter by itself or complexed with benzoate, a product from the upper pathway. When activated Pm expresses Xyl D-L to finish degrading toluene. Sensing Toluene
Our project is aimed at characterizing the promoters in the pWW0 plasmid to sense when the toluene degrading process is finished, signaling the cell to commit suicide. The promoter we chose to sense the presence of toluene is the Pu promoter. In order to characterize this promoter we created Bba_K270003, a device that has the Pu promoter expressing GFP. To have this device function in strains other than P. putida mt-2 that already contains the XylR regulating protein, the part Bba_K270001 was created from the Pr XylR portion of the pWW0 plasmid to regulate the Pu promoter. By combining the functions of these two parts, the intensity of GFP can be used to measure the promoter activity when induced with non-lethal level of toluene.
Suicide MechanismThe Terminator's suicide mechanism, or kill switch, operates through the [http://partsregistry.org/wiki/index.php?title=Part:BBa_K112808Enterobacteria phage T4 Lysis Device] created by the Berkley 2008 team. We proposed two mechanisms for cell lysis: arabinose inducible suicide mechanism and suicide mechanism with tunable repression. These two kill switches could both appear, with others, in a final device, considering that severalfold kill switch redundancy will be necessary to prevent "runaway Terminators" (see Safety page). In the both models the Pu promoter is controlling the cell survival and we make the assumption that when the cells are used for bioremediation purposes they are placed in a toluene-contaminated environment. Arabinose-Dependent Suicide Mechanism
This suicide operon consists of an arabinose-dependent promoter controlling expression of the holin and lysozyme proteins, followed by the Pu promoter controlling the antiholin gene shown in the figure below. This way, none of the genes are activated until the device is released into the contaminated area, along with a quantity of arabinose. This results in the arabinose-mediated expression of the lytic genes holin and lysozyme, as well as the toluene-mediated expression of antiholin, which posttranslationally inhibits the lytic proteins. Then, when the toluene disappears (when it is all metabolized) from the local region of the individual device, antiholin is no longer expressed, allowing the lytic proteins to destroy the cell.
Suicide Mechanism with Tunable RepressionIn this design, a repression mechanism is downstream of the Pu promoter, and this this represses the production of holin and lysozyme proteins. A constitutive promoter is placed in the front of the antiholin gene so antiholin is constantly produced. When toluene is present, it activates the Pu promoter which results in the repression of the promoter expressing holin and lysozyme. As a result, the cell survives. However, in the absence of toluene, the repressor protein is not produced, so holin and lysozyme levels rise to the point that the cells are lysed. This design is fairly tunable because we can choose which repression system to use, through which we can tweak the holin-antiholin balance.
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