Team:ETH Zurich

From 2011.igem.org

(Difference between revisions)

Revision as of 12:02, 21 September 2011

Can you feel the smoke tonight?

SmoColi

SmoColi is a bacterio-quantifier of smoke concentration that can be used as a passive smoke detector. Cigarette smoke contains a lot of different toxic and carcinogenic substances, most of which are volatile, e.g. acetaldehyde or xylene. Therefore we can use them as an airborne information carrier. The SmoColi cells are immobilized in an agarose-filled microfluidic device. The test solution is fed to one end of a microfluidic channel, in which a concentration gradient is established by diffusion and synthetic cellular degradation. The cells are engineered to sense a certain molecule. Some sensors were integrated as found in nature, others had to by synthetically re-designed, e.g. the fungal acetaldehyde-responsive transactivator. The sensor is linked to a band-pass filter that drives GFP expression. This allows establishment of an input-concentration-dependent, moving fluorescent band displaying quantitative information of the input. Finally, if the input concentration exceeds the threshold of malignance, a quorum-sensing-based mCherry alarm system springs into action, turning the entire device red.

Overview of the system

Link to Data Page goes here

Our Sponsors

@@ Line 3: / Line 3: @@
 |style="font-size:2em; height: 30px" class="overview"|SmoColi
 |-
-|'''SmoColi is a bacterio-quantifier of acetaldehyde concentration that can be used as a passive smoke detector. Acetaldehyde is a toxic and carcinogenic component of cigarette smoke. It has a boiling point of 20.2 °C and is very volatile, thus can be used as an information carrier through air. The SmoColi cells are immobilized in an agarose-filled microfluidic device. The test solution is fed to one end of a microfluidic channel, in which an acetaldehyde gradient is established by diffusion and synthetic cellular degradation. The cells are engineered to sense acetaldehyde by a synthetically re-designed fungal acetaldehyde-responsive transactivator. The sensor is linked to a band-pass filter that drives GFP expression. This allows establishment of an input-concentration-dependent, moving fluorescent band displaying quantitative information about acetaldehyde. Finally, if the acetaldehyde concentration exceeds the threshold of malignance, a quorum-sensing-based mCherry alarm system springs into action, turning the entire device red.'''
+|'''SmoColi is a bacterio-quantifier of smoke concentration that can be used as a passive smoke detector. Cigarette smoke contains a lot of different toxic and carcinogenic substances, most of which are volatile, e.g. acetaldehyde or xylene. Therefore we can use them as an airborne information carrier. The SmoColi cells are immobilized in an agarose-filled microfluidic device. The test solution is fed to one end of a microfluidic channel, in which a concentration gradient is established by diffusion and synthetic cellular degradation. The cells are engineered to sense a certain molecule. Some sensors were integrated as found in nature, others had to by synthetically re-designed, e.g. the fungal acetaldehyde-responsive transactivator. The sensor is linked to a band-pass filter that drives GFP expression. This allows establishment of an input-concentration-dependent, moving fluorescent band displaying quantitative information of the input. Finally, if the input concentration exceeds the threshold of malignance, a quorum-sensing-based mCherry alarm system springs into action, turning the entire device red.'''
 |}