Team:IIT Madras/Project

From 2009.igem.org

(Difference between revisions)
Line 1: Line 1:
{|align="justify"
{|align="justify"
-
|Our team comprises of 9 young undergraduates pursuing their bachelors in Biotechnology and is supported by two faculty members from the Dept. of Biotechnology of our institute. Our project is based on the concept of plasmid loss or in other words plasmid instability in bacterial cells. By the end of September we hope to complete the project and get our model working. We also hope to supplement this with some computer simulation work which would demonstrate the variations in the parameters we want to look at with the number of plasmids in question.
+
|
-
Faculty advisors:
+
-
Dr. Guhan Jayaraman,
+
-
Dr. Madhulika Dixit
+
-
 
+
-
The team:
+
-
Ramakrishna Simhadri,
+
-
Ajit Kamath,
+
-
B. Harshvardhan,
+
-
Srivats V,
+
-
Arun Murali,
+
-
Swathi Ayloo,
+
-
M. Abdul Majeed,
+
-
B. Bhavya,
+
-
Pawan Singh
+
|[[Image:Example_logo.png|200px|right]]
|[[Image:Example_logo.png|200px|right]]
|-
|-
|
|
-
''Tell us more about your project. Give us background.  Use this is the abstract of your project. Be descriptive but concise (1-2 paragraphs)''
+
''Our project is based on the fundamental concept of plasmid instability in a novel way to conceal information or ‘lock’ a gene’s function in a cell until the correct combination of inputs is fed into the cell. We call this a ‘combinatorial lock’.
 +
It involves the positive regulation of the gene of interest only on receiving the correct inputs from the user. We use plasmids which can confer resistance to certain antibiotics in the medium and link them up in a certain way (i.e, design a genetic circuit) so that they repress the expression of the gene of our interest. As the selection pressure is lifted from the media, the plasmids which have the repressors for the gene of interest are lost, hence revealing the gene on using the correct series of antibiotic washes. In essence, the process of unlocking would simply be the correct sequence of antibiotic media in which the cells should be washed.
 +
We would be working with both a 2 plasmid system as well as 3 plasmid system and it is easy to see that this principle, in theory, could be extended to n plasmids. We intend to demonstrate this with simulations in matlab.
 +
One can think of a number of potential applications of this system of ‘combinatorial locks’, an example being the field of medicine. Human body releases a myriad of chemicals everyday in a certain order according to external stimuli or otherwise. In case of a disease, if this order goes awry, then this lock can be used to release the required chemicals to bring back the desired equilibrium. Also, when one wants to have the expression of a gene of commercial interest available only to licensed users and not a third party, this lock could be used.
 +
 
|[[Image:Team.png|right]]
|[[Image:Team.png|right]]
|-
|-

Revision as of 10:24, 5 August 2009

Example logo.png

Our project is based on the fundamental concept of plasmid instability in a novel way to conceal information or ‘lock’ a gene’s function in a cell until the correct combination of inputs is fed into the cell. We call this a ‘combinatorial lock’. It involves the positive regulation of the gene of interest only on receiving the correct inputs from the user. We use plasmids which can confer resistance to certain antibiotics in the medium and link them up in a certain way (i.e, design a genetic circuit) so that they repress the expression of the gene of our interest. As the selection pressure is lifted from the media, the plasmids which have the repressors for the gene of interest are lost, hence revealing the gene on using the correct series of antibiotic washes. In essence, the process of unlocking would simply be the correct sequence of antibiotic media in which the cells should be washed. We would be working with both a 2 plasmid system as well as 3 plasmid system and it is easy to see that this principle, in theory, could be extended to n plasmids. We intend to demonstrate this with simulations in matlab. One can think of a number of potential applications of this system of ‘combinatorial locks’, an example being the field of medicine. Human body releases a myriad of chemicals everyday in a certain order according to external stimuli or otherwise. In case of a disease, if this order goes awry, then this lock can be used to release the required chemicals to bring back the desired equilibrium. Also, when one wants to have the expression of a gene of commercial interest available only to licensed users and not a third party, this lock could be used.

Team.png
Team Example 2


Home The Team The Project Parts Submitted to the Registry Modeling Notebook

(Or you can choose different headings. But you must have a team page, a project page, and a notebook page.)


Contents

Overall project

Your abstract




Project Details

Part 2

The Experiments

Part 3

Results