Team:Macquarie Australia

G'day from the 2011 Macquarie University iGEM group.

This year's research team will be expanding upon the research conducted by last year's iGEM team. This project involves the production of a phytochrome light switch that jumps between two different light states, acting as a reporter for ambient light conditions. We've nicknamed our work 'the switch-a-roo' as our phytochromes hop back and forth between green and blue states.

Here are some quick links to help you get started:

• An overview of our Project


• Head on over to our Data Page for a summary of our registered parts


• Or meet the Team!

The objective in this project is to build and characterise a biological light switch in E.coli. This will involve construction of bacteriophytochrome biobrick parts and heme-oxygenase biobrick parts. In 2010 the Macquarie Team cloned bacteriophytochrome from two sources. They showed that when one was expressed that it was functionally assembled when incubated with biliverdin. The part created is not directly usable as a biobrick as it contains an internal PstI site and the XbaI biobrick site is missing. The heme-oxygenase clone also contains an internal restriction site which is not compatible with biobrick assembly.

Medal Progress

Bronze	Silver
Registration of Team	Working BioBricks
Team Wiki
Present at iGEM Jamboree