This summer we engineered the nematode worm C. elegans to build a bioremediation toolkit.
To get a quick overview of our project, take a look of the video to the right where Adrian, Stephanie, Tony and Allister give a rundown of the summer objectives. To see where we came from and other possible summer projects, check out our brainstorming sessions section.
Bioremediation Toolkit
Discover why our team choose to examine the environmental concerns of contamination in soils with in our rationale section. Browse our main project goal or take a look at
Transgenic Chemotaxis
As the principal goal of our project, modifying the worm's normal chemotaxis mechanism to increase it's affinity for toxic chemicals was completed through creating genetic constructs to inject C. elegans worms.
A breakdown of the findings can be found on the results page, while the video gallery offers a glimpse of our worms in action!
Reporter System
When targeting a pollutant, we researched an effective method to assess the concentration of chemical present. Our findings are outline here.
As a first step, we successfully engineered a worm to express a cyan fluorescent protein in a chemotaxis neuron!
Biodegradation Mechanism
Use Our Parts
All of our parts are available to be used in your future synthetic biology project. We created x composite constructs and submitted y modular components to the iGEM parts registry. For future iGEM teams, we also included a few intermediate constructs to build from.