Team:UC Davis/Project1/Finding ph sensor

 

Finding an appropriate biological pH sensor:

Why is there a need for a pH sensor?

           We would like our probiotic organism to confine itself to the stomach. Since low pH is a hallmark of the stomach, it seems reasonable to assume that linking the production of a suicide gene to a dramatic increase in pH (to values found in the intestine) should allow us to sequester our organism to the stomach. There are no pH sensors available on the registry of biological parts. So, we will engineer a device to sense extracellular pH changes and design it so that it can be used to regulate the expression of any target gene in confinement by pH levels, and then add it to the registry!

Finding an appropriate biological pH sensor:

            We have decided to design our pH sensor by adopting one of the pH sensors of Agrobacterium tumefaciens. The ChvG/ChvI two-component system of A.tumefaciens is suspected to sense extracellular pH changes and relay this environmental signal to numerous virulence-related promoters(2).

                   For more information regarding ChvG/ChvI two component system, go to ChvG, ChvI, ChvG--->ChvI