Team:British Columbia

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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!

Sensors: This links to the pBAD promoters that sense the arabinose. Lock and Key: this controls when the colors are produced The Jammer: this mRNA sequence blocks the key from opening the lock.



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.
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:

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