Overview

Project Overview

Halorhodopsin, a light-driven ion pump originated from Halobacterium, utilizeslight to specifically transport chloride ions into cells against osmolality. Since chloride ion is a ubiquitousand essential element in most biological systems,halorhodopsin has fascinated property whereit accumulates light energy, the most abundant energy in the world, asintracellular chloride ion level. However, this attracting ion channel hasn’tbeen well-characterized yet in the past competition. It is of our great interest tocharacterize and utilize the gene in our project, seeking the possibilities tobenefit synthetic biology and the human society.

In our project, we successfully integratedhalorhodopsin into functional biobricks. We developed and implemented twoinnovative applications based on the property of halorhodopsin: Light-coupledcomputer-aided expression platform and entropy-mixing electrical powergeneration. The result is interesting and presents us the power and potentialof this fascinating tool. We are glad to introduce our achievements in theproject session.

Besides the ideasproven in our projects, there are much more potential applications to bedeveloped. Anything with linkage of light and chloride ions might beaccomplished by this tool. We believe that halorhodopsin would be an excitingand useful biobrick in the future.