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Team:UCL London
From 2009.igem.org
Sponsors
Welcome to the Stress Busters Homepage
Welcome to the UCL_London team 2009!
Our project “Stress Light” aims to produce a series of biosensor devises which can improve the traditional mechanical measurements in bio-processing by using the different fluorescent proteins as indicators of different stresses for bacteria during bio-processing. Our product and system is called “the traffic-light stress sensor” and is meant to send out fluorescent proteins of different colors in response to different stresses which are inhibiting growth or harming production. Description
Ideally the cells responses to stress conditions should be sufficiently rapid for the stresses to be detected and mitigated. Objective
Besides making bioprocesses easier to monitor, analyse and hence optimize, we believe that well functioning biobricks responding accurately to processing conditions (e.g. oxygen levels) can have a broad set of general applications; e.g. to make induction of large scale bioprocesses more cost effective or be used to develop self inducible or self regulated bioprocesses.Vision
The Team
This is UCL's first time entering into this competition. We are the "Stress Busters" made up of four magnificent students, and 3 super supervisors!
Abstract
The “Stress light” project was inspired by the quandary of having a deeper understanding on the internal environment and feelings of cells. Therefore, the Stress Busters came up with a novel biosensor that detects specific stresses at which the cells are under.
DegP for instance was the promoter used to detect any mis-folded protein produced by the cells. Spy, Nark and mNarK are other promoters used in response to oxygen stresses.
Overall these four to fives months our team has been working earnestly to try to identify particular stresses, ligate the parts and carry out various experiments to validate and verify our device as a working biosensor.
