Team:Edinburgh/Efficiency

From 2011.igem.org

Revision as of 13:22, 2 August 2011 by Allancrossman (Talk | contribs)

(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)

Obviously, the highest type of efficiency is that which can utilize existing material to the best advantage.

— Jawaharlal Nehru

Is display of cellulases via phage or INP any good, even in theory?

Consider this: for a bacteria to produce phage or INP requires energy. This energy could have been spent producing extra copies of the cellulases. In order for the phage and cell display projects to make sense, the benefits of synergy must outweigh the cost of producing all these extra proteins.

This question can probably be investigated using simple maths and back-of-envelope calculations...

Ice Nucleation Protein

For the cell display system, the carrier protein INP (which is fused to a cellulase) is about two thirds the size of any of the cellulases. Each cellulase thus has a final size of about 166% of normal.

So if the synergystic system works at over 166% efficiency compared to the standard system where enzymes are free-floating in the media, cell display via INP makes sense.

Phage

The situation with phage is more complex.