Team:NYC Wetware/BioNumbers

There’s a Gene for That

Deinococcus Radioduran (D. rad) is famous for being resistant to 3000 times the radiation dose lethal to humans. Inspired to prove the potential of genetic engineering, the New York City iGEM Team chose to create radiation-resistant biobricks. We planned to find the genes that give D. rad extraordinary radiation resistance, and put them into loserish bacteria like E. coli, and see if we could turn the E. coli into super-hero bacteria.

By finding genes that allow life to thrive in extremely harsh environments, we help develop the emerging field of genetic engineering into a classic engineering disciplines like electrical and mechanical engineering. We will demonstrated that we too can tackle the complex problems. Below find a table of extremophile values. Achieve these and demonstrate the power of synthetic biology to yourselves, fellow iGEM teams, fellow engineers and the general public. In addition to the list below, we are submitting these values to the BioNumbers Database. Good Luck!

Extremophile Numbers
High Radiation: Deinocuccus radiodurans can live in 15000 Gy
Low Temperature: Arthrobacter can live in < -15 celsius
High Temperature: Strain 121 can live in 130 celsius
High Pressure: Some microbes can survive 130 MPa
Vacuum: Some insects, microbes and seeds can live in total vacuum
Salinity (Concentration): Dunaliella salina can live in 2-5 M NaCl
High pH : As yet unnamed can live in 12.8
Low pH: Cyanidium caldarium can survive 0
Either oxygen deficient OR carbon dioxide deficient environments: Chloroflexus aurantacus can live in 0M O2 OR 0M CO2
Low Water Activity :Saccharomyces rouxii can live in 0.62

Some Extraordinary Synthetic Biology Numbers
Longest synthetic genome: The 1.08-mega-base pairMycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0 Genome
Longest sustained expression of a pore-forming protein in a liposome was 4 Days
Enzyme efficiency of wintergreen-smell producing Biobrick BBa_J45004 (mM-1⋅s-1) in E. coli is 7.65 ± 0.618

BioNumbers is the database of useful biological numbers. It aims to enable you to find in one minute any common biological number important for your research, such as the rate of translation of the ribosome, concentrations of metabolites or the number of bacteria in your gut. You will find full references as well as additional extraordinary numbers. Check it out at: www.bioNumbers.hms.harvard.edu.

Please let us know any suggestions and comments: ron.milo@weizmann.ac.il or yossisteinberger@gmail.com