Team:Berkeley Wetlab

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Preliminary project description

The University of California Berkeley iGEM team is proposing to expand the design space of synthetic biology by exploring novel applications of cell surface display within Escherichia coli, the gold standard organism for bacterial engineering. The team envisions a bottom-up design scheme in order to tackle this engineering problem in a well organized, modular fashion. In order to overcome the challenges of engineering Escherichia coli cell surface display, a high throughput, automated, combinatorial strategy is employed to control the system.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> Berkeley UC - IGEM07

The University of California Berkeley iGem team is proposing to expand the design space of synthetic biology by exploring novel applications of cell surface display within Escherichia coli, the gold standard organism for bacterial engineering. The team envisions a bottom-up design scheme in order to tackle this engineering problem in a well organized, modular fashion. In order to overcome the challenges of engineering Escherichia coli cell surface display, a high throughput, automated, combinatorial strategy is employed to control the system.

Support for Berkeley iGEM 2009 was generously provided by SynBERC and The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, Inc.

The System's Components
	Oxygen Transport Our system is designed to produce Hemoglobin, Heme, and the necessary chaperones and detoxifying agents to promote the transport of oxygen throughout the bloodstream. We also investigated alternates to hemoglobin and other strategies for its production.
	The Chassis Our bacterial chassis has been heavily modified to remove its sepsis-inducing toxicity, immunogenic factors, and ability to grow within the bloodstream, as well as promote its ability to last longer in the bloodstream by masking it from the immune system.
	The Controller The Controller is an integrated genetic circuit comprised of two plasmids that allows stable maintenance of the system's various operons on a large single-copy plasmid in a dormant state. Upon induction, the copy number of the operons and their transcription increase 100-fold resulting in a dramatic increase in protein expression.
	Genetic Self-Destruct To prevent chance of infection or unwanted proliferation after hemoglobin production, we have engineered a genetic self-destruct mechanism whereby when induced, the bacterial cell will express a genetic material-degrading toxin which kills the cell, but leaves it physically intact.
	Freeze Drying To enable preservation of our bacteria for prolonged periods, we are including the ability to produce the compounds hydroxyectoine and trehalose that will enable our bacteria to survive freeze-drying intact. This will dramatically increase shelf-life and decrease transport costs.

	Human Practices An examination of the landscape of patents and the patentablilty of Bactoblood where its parts are in an open source forum and the challenges associated with current patenting practices for synthetic biology.
	Individual Contributions The specific contributions made by each team member and advisor.
	Team Resources Organizational spreadsheets, useful tools and links.
	Team Notebooks The team members' daily logs of our research.