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Team:British Columbia/Project
From 2009.igem.org
'Overview of the Traffic Light Biosensor:
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").
Subparts:
1. A variable sensitivity biosensor
2. A lock-and-key logic gate system
3. An antisense "off" switch
Miscellaneous Data
We also produced a couple tools to help out the project:
- Biobricks.zip - Fasta file containing every biobrick from [http://partsregistry.org/cgi/partsdb/pgroup.cgi?pgroup=List Here]
- http://www.pkts.ca/bb - Biobrick digestion engine - enter the name of a biobrick plasmid and biobrick insert, and this will show you the product of an EcoRI and PstI digestion/ligation as a FASTA file (suitable for viewing in your favorite program).
- http://www.pkts.ca/brickedit/ - Biobrick picture maker - enter a sequence of letters corresponding to the icons, and the program will produce a concatenated file of the Biobrick.
Links
http://rna.tbi.univie.ac.at/ - a package of prediction tools for RNA structures; we used RNAfold to annotate the key and lock structures
http://mobyle.pasteur.fr/cgi-bin/portal.py - a set of web-accessible bioinformatics tools including Mfold, which determines 2D RNA structure and draws it
http://frodo.wi.mit.edu/ - Primer3, a primer design program
