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Team:Paris Bettencourt/Preliminaries
From 2011.igem.org
Demonstrative experiments
The Dubey and Ben-Yehuda work [1] present a set of experiments to demonstrate the existence of the nanotubes. We reproduced some of them in order to demonstrate again the existence of these entities as a medium of communication between bacteria, and to be sure we are in the good experimental conditions to reproduce them as basis for testing our designs.
We reproduced the two keystone experiments of the paper: the GFP diffusion, and the antibiotic resistance exchange (with less suscess).
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The GFP diffusion experiment is a simple experiment. One Bacillus Subtlis strain that produces GFP is mixed with a wild type strain on solid support under the microscope. If some nanotubes are formed, the GFP will diffuse through the tubes and color the non fluorescent strain. We invite you to visit the corresponding page to learn more about what we did and see our successful reproduction of this set of results. |
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The antibiotic resistance exchange is a more tricky experiment in which bacteria are sought to exchange resistance enzyme(s) (or their coding mRNA) through nanotubes, thus allowing a mixed population of two strains, each carrying a different resistance gene to survive on agar plate with both antibiotics incorporated.We invite you to visit corresponding the page to learn more about what we did and the mixedresults we had, suggesting alternative explanation to the survival of the two populations. |
