The Etch-a-Sketch project aims to create a lawn of bacteria that can be drawn on with a laser pointer. This seemingly inconsequential task actually presents many interesting engineering challenges. In particular, the bacteria need to be extremely sensitive in order to respond to a short light pulse from a laser, but they still must be “selective” enough to use in ambient lighting.
We have designed a novel genetic switch that we hope will tackle these problems. If our work proves successful, it will serve as a useful model for future projects that require massive signal amplification. In particular, researchers creating biosensors may find our work very helpful.
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The Full Adder project seeks to create bacteria that can mimic a digital full adder. Since many teams have difficulty creating even something small like a XOR gate, this project would seem nearly impossible. However, we have found that the problem can be greatly simplified if we use a certain simple “encoding” on the outputs of the full adder. By the end of the summer we hope to demonstrate the world’s first (to our knowledge) bacterial full adder.
Our insights may prove useful to any genetic engineer or synthetic biologist working on highly complex systems. If successful, the bacterial full adder may very well become the ancestor to more complicated biological calculators in the future.
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A major problem with the current Parts Registry, a library of BioBricks submitted by iGEM teams, is that many parts do not strictly conform to the BioBrick standard which makes certain operations extremely difficult. Rutger's iGEM software team strives to provide a tool to improve the standard parts registry by checking, and if need be modifying, the BioBrick parts.
The basic idea is that before a team submits their new BioBrick, it will run the genetic sequences through MYS!S. MYS!S will output the modified genetic sequence, BioCoder source code, and the lab protocol needed to change the unmodified sequence into the modified sequence The long term goal of the project is to further the automation of lab protocols by specifying them through algorithms.
The next iteration of the project will focus on a CAD program for BioBricks that will output all the steps necessary to create a genetic circuit in the lab. MYS!S, at first, will be available on Java and Clotho. Later, may expand into iPad and Android.
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