Team:British Columbia
From 2009.igem.org
Home Team Traffic Light Sensor Lock&Key Jammer [http://partsregistry.org/cgi/partsdb/pgroup.cgi?pgroup=iGEM2009&group=British_Columbia Parts] Safety Sponsors Notebook Bibliography
The Bacterial Traffic Light:
A flexible, modular, and transparent system for multi-level assessment of variable inputs.'
Biosensors have a diverse variety of real-world functions, ranging from measuring blood glucose levels in diabetes patients to assessing environmental contamination of trace toxins. The majority of these sensors are highly specific for a single input, and their outputs often require specialized equipment such as surface plasmon resonance chips. Our project aims to create a biosensor that recognizes a specific target and alters its output fluorescence from green, to yellow, to red as a function of concentration up to critical levels (hence, a biological "traffic light").
Click the colours of the traffic light to learn about its different subparts!
[[Image:E_coli_Traffic_Light_Subprojects.png|center|thumb||400px|The ''E. coli'' Traffic Light Biosensor is composed of three major subparts: variable arabinose-inducible promoters, RNA lock and key system, and reverse antisense promoters for input detection, color activation and traffic light switching respectively.]]
[[Image:E_coli_Traffic_Light_Step_by_Step.png|thumb|center|700px|Schematic black-box representation of the E. coli Biosensor that detects various concentration inputs and color outputs. The idea is discrete analog outputs based on a user-specified threshold for each range of concentration.]]
The Traffic Light is composed of three distinct subparts:
- The pBAD promoter family
- The lock and key riboregulation system
- The Jammer.