Team:Wisconsin-Madison/umad

This summer, the UW-Madison iGEM team will be working on streamlining the biofuel discovery and production processes through the use of biosensors and microcompartments. The necessity for sustainable, economical sources of fuel is ever growing, and UW-Madison is a forefront institution in the hunt for such supplies. In association with the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC), we are creating new E. coli biosensors that can accelerate high throughput screening of potential fuel sources. We’re specifically interested in ethanol and alkane, derived from sources ranging from cellulose to metabolically engineered E. coli.

We have found regulatory systems which respond to each of the biofuels of interest, and are using standard BioBrick assembly to create E. coli strains which can be used to perform fluorescence-based assays. By using fluorescent biosensors, we hope to lower costs (in both equipment and cost-per-sample) while maintaining a high degree of accuracy. In the interest of creating robust and accurate assays, we are also attempting to increase the magnitude and range of the linear fluorescence response through directed evolution. We hope to leverage multiple selections to both decrease basal fluorescence and increase the point where the response becomes saturated.

As a more direct approach to increasing microbial biofuel yields, we are also pursuing the use of bacterial microcompartments (BMCs) as scaffolding for key enzymes. We hope that through localizing crucial anabolic enzymes, as well as the beginning of our sensing cascades, to the BMC surfaces, we can increase fuel titers as well as our reliability in accurately sensing them.

We hope that when combined our projects will produce a useful toolkit for researchers in and beyond the GLBRC to aid the discovery and engineering of promising fuel sources and processes.

What is iGEM?

iGEM is a synthetic biology competition and stands for Internationally Genetically Engineered Machines. It began as a friendly competition between 10 MIT teams in 2004, and has since grown to over 130 teams in 2010 from all different countries around the globe. This year even more teams are anticipated, and there will be regional competitions held before the annual international jamboree held at MIT in the fall.

iGEM revolves around two main ideas: the use of BioBricks and the registry. Biobricks are pieces of DNA that have been given a similar structure and that code for something useful. They can be big or small and may contain one or many individual pieces of useful information all packaged into one coherent piece. These biobricks all contain the same interface and thus can be copied and pasted into new DNA with ease.

Each new part, once confirmed, is sent to MIT and physically stored there in the registry. Any other iGEM team can order any Biobrick from the Registry for use in their project, and get physical copies that are easily cultured and can be quickly used, without having to be manufactured by the teams. This open source structure speeds up the research progress significantly and makes great strides in the future of synthetic biology.