Team:Hong Kong-CUHK/Project/overview

From 2011.igem.org

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Halorhodopsin, a light-driven ion pump originated from Halobacterium, employs light to transport chloride ions into cells uni-directionally against osmolality. Since chloride ion is a ubiquitous and essential element in most biological systems, halorhodopsin has thefascinated property to transform solar energy, the most abundant energy in theworld, into intracellular chloride ion level. However, this specificity of halorhodopsinhasn’t been well regulated and characterized in the previous competition. It is of our great interest to characterize its properties, and eventually utilize them in our project, seeking the possibilities tobenefit synthetic biology and the human society.
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<h3>Previous related projects</h3>
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In our project, we integrated halorhodopsininto functional biobricks. Based on the characterized properties ofhalorhodopsin, we have furthermore developed and implemented two innovativeapplications: Light-coupled computer-aided expression platform and entropy-mixingelectrical power generation. The exciting results show us the power and thepotential of this fascinating tool. We are glad to introduce our achievements inthe project session.
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Besides the proof-of-conceptdesigns in our projects, any design with the linkage of light and chloride ionscan be accomplished by this tool. Thus, there are much more potentialapplications development. We believe that halorhodopsin would be an excitingand useful biobrick in the future.
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In 2010 iGEM competition, Queens-Canada team submited <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halorhodopsin">Halorhodopsin</a> from <em>H. salinarum</em> as biobricks and inserted this gene into <em>C. elegans</em>. However, it was not well characterized. This year, we are trying to clone halorhdopsin from <em>N. pharaonis,</em> which has already been successfully introduced and proved to perform complete light cycles in <em> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli">E. coli</a>, </em>to our biobrick system<sup>1</sup>. We aim to characterize the efficiency of this <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halorhodopsin">Halorhodopsin</a> to be a well-documented biobrick and a useful tool in <em> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli">E. coli</a> </em>.
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In previous iGEM projects, various light sensors have been developed, including red light sensor (UT Austin, 2004), green light sensor (Tokyo-Nokogen, 2009) and blue light sensor (University of Edinburgh, 2010). They are all light-induced fusion transcription factors that trigger gene expression under the control of specific promoters, facilitating simply on/off switch and light-coupled communication. However, our design makes <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halorhodopsin">Halorhodopsin</a> not only a dynamically tunable light sensor – by coupling with chloride sensitive promoters (e.g. P<sub>gad</sub>), but also an energy converter – by storing solar energy as osmolality potential and further converted it into electricity. Our project would provide a wilder scope of applications from signal transduction and gene regulation to energy generation.
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References
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1.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Hohenfeld, I. Purification of histidine tagged bacteriorhodopsin, pharaonis <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halorhodopsin">Halorhodopsin</a> and pharaonis sensory rhodopsin II functionally expressed in Escherichia coli. <em>FEBS Letters</em> <strong>442</strong>,198-202(1999).
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Revision as of 02:55, 6 October 2011

Halorhodopsin, a light-driven ion pump originated from Halobacterium, employs light to transport chloride ions into cells uni-directionally against osmolality. Since chloride ion is a ubiquitous and essential element in most biological systems, halorhodopsin has thefascinated property to transform solar energy, the most abundant energy in theworld, into intracellular chloride ion level. However, this specificity of halorhodopsinhasn’t been well regulated and characterized in the previous competition. It is of our great interest to characterize its properties, and eventually utilize them in our project, seeking the possibilities tobenefit synthetic biology and the human society. In our project, we integrated halorhodopsininto functional biobricks. Based on the characterized properties ofhalorhodopsin, we have furthermore developed and implemented two innovativeapplications: Light-coupled computer-aided expression platform and entropy-mixingelectrical power generation. The exciting results show us the power and thepotential of this fascinating tool. We are glad to introduce our achievements inthe project session. Besides the proof-of-conceptdesigns in our projects, any design with the linkage of light and chloride ionscan be accomplished by this tool. Thus, there are much more potentialapplications development. We believe that halorhodopsin would be an excitingand useful biobrick in the future.

"Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things." - Theodore Levitt

©Copyright CUHK IGEM Team 2011

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