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Team:Cambridge/Notebook
From 2009.igem.org
Contents |
iGEM Thought-shower
Monday 12 July
Each team member researched their own ideas for our project
Tuesday 13 July
Afternoon presentations - possible projects included
- Bacto-Stat
- Counterfeit Bill Detector
- Traffic light-obedient bacteria
- Light-induced pigment production
- Predator prey bacteria + a parasite
- Modelling pesticide resistance
- Galvanotaxis
- Wave-pulse bacteria
- Ai2 quorum sensing system
Conclusions
Decided to concentrate on a pigment output. Wednesday plans involve discussing ideas for pigments, following the same meeting pattern used on Tuesday. Ideally the pigment output would be a new registery part which could then be connected to any input system
Wednesday 14 July
Investigated possible outputs, with a kind of bacterial printer in mind
Colour Wheels
- Primary school style: BLUE, YELLOW, RED
- True colour wheel: YELLOW, CYAN, MAGENTA
- Autochrome: ORANGE, GREEN, VIOLET
Viable Pigments
- In an ideal system, we would have lots of pathways making different coloured pigments from a common precursor. One can dream...
- Carotenoids - RED, ORANGE, YELLOW
- Biobricks exist for part of the system
- apparently you can go from yellow to white (cool)
- Pseudomons aeruginosa - RED, GREENISH/BLUE
- Pyocyanin is greenish/blue, can be synthesized from chorismic acid, or more simply, from phenazine-1-carboxylic acid (PCA)
- Knocking out one of the genes between PCA and pyocyanin leads to the production of a red pigment
- Chromobacterium violacein - VIOLET, CYAN
- Violacein is a violet pigment
- A precursor is cyan.
- BROWN
- melanin - easily attainable
- anyway we could make black?
Follow ups for tomorrow
- Possible inputs
- Population control
- bacterial chlorophyll?
Thursday 15 July
Hoping to start wet work on Monday!
Pigments
- Duncan has orange and brown bacteria we can start to work with. The melanin gene has been sequence, has a restriction site we would need to remove to submit it to the registry.
- We have the genes for violacein! And there are no internal restriction sites that would need to be removed.
- Contacted the authors of a paper to get the genes for pyocyanin biosynthesis. Two of them have forbidden restriciton sites, so we'll need to figure out how to remove them.
Inputs
- explored the idea of using common repressor / inducer systems - arabinose, lac repressor, and tet repressor - to control pigment production
- scourged the registry for lots of different inducible promoters
Popluation Control
- Crispain proposed a growth control dependency pathway that would make the growth of each type of bacterium (red colour-producing, blue colour-producing, yellow colour-producing, for example) dependent on an other using HSLs
