Team:Arizona State/Notebook/April

From 2011.igem.org


Notebook: April


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Thursday, April 14

  • Today we had our first meeting with a grad student- just bouncing some ideas off of him for feasibility. There is no RNAi in prokaryotes! Some ideas included a small molecule inhibitor / morpholino oligomers.
  • The first CRISPR information was found and was noted as something to follow up on in further meetings.

Thursday, April 21

  • We discussed CRISPR more exensively- we are beginning to latch onto the idea as a fully formed project. Building on earlier discussions, the goal would be to target an antibiotic resistance gene (NDM-1) to ameliorate that resistance completely.

Thursday, April 28

  • Ethan presented an outline of CRISPR and the possible project to the group for consideration. Some questions that came up:
  • What is the advantage of using this entire process? Is not it kind of roundabout?
  • The structure of CRISPR lends itself to a modular platform- the degree to which the pathway is active can be shown to be dependent on the number of spacers which are easily controlled.
  • How will we motivate bacteria to take up potentially deleterious genetic material? What about an F-factor plasmid?
  • Trojan Horse D- maintains growth advantage
  • What has been done, what is the advantage of this approach?
  • Practical point of view: two steps that can be done in parallel
  1. CRISPR design for different sequences
  2. Downregulate NDM1 protein with plasmid
  • Can we use phages to introduce a CRISPR array?
  • High throughput methods & random mutations, screen for them
  • Could we use CRISPR to downregulate a repressor of something?