Team:UEA-JIC Norwich/Project

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<h1 style="font-family:verdana;color:black">Project Overview</h1>
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Plants are an extremely versatile form of life and they are essential to the world we know.  Plants, should be a major focus for Synthetic Biology due to their potential use in an array of applications from food security to the synthesis of biofuels. However the short time scale of the iGEM competition has often meant that there have been very few in previous years.  There are also a great many challenges to using plants in iGEM including growth time and the complexity associated with adapting Synthetic Biology approaches for plants.
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As the first iGEM team at UEA and in co-operation with the JIC, we felt that we could make a significant contribution to plant based Synthetic Biology. The overall aim of our project is to help develop and where possible pioneer some of the fundamental technologies and methodologies needed to make plant based Synthetic Biology projects possible. To achieve this we hope to adapt existing Synthetic Biology approaches which are successful in <i>Escherichia coli</i> for use in plants.
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To achieve the aim of our project we decided to work with <i>Physcomitrella patens</i> and <i>Chlamydomonas reinhardtii</i> with the intention of establishing these photosynthetic eukaryotes this year for future iGEM competitions. One of the reasons that we decided to pursue the introduction of our chosen photosynthetic eukaryotic species was due to the increased versatility of eukaryotic protein post-translational modifications. Eukaryotic post-translational modification can be vital for the successful expression of proteins. Post-translational methylation and glycosylation patterns are rarely conserved across species and never across the three Kingdoms of life. Thus, a eukaryotic protein can be produced in a given bacterial species by transferring the gene, but due to aberrant or non-existent methylation and glycosylation, will be unable to conduct the wild type functioning of the protein. Eukaryotic model organisms are therefore vital for reflecting the likely outcomes of intregrating systems composed of genes from an amalgamation of species when expressed in a eukaryotic organism.
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To lay the groundwork we planned to generate an array of biobricks including; promoters, terminators and other biobricks with useful properties. We carefully designed our biobricks to utilise antibiotic resistances which could be used in both bacteria and in our photosynthetic species. We needed a strategy to help us to achieve this and so we decided to use biobricks which could give quick and definitive results, such as GFP. With this approach we could test the biobricks in bacteria before trying to transform them into our plant species. At the same time we could also grow our transformed cultures and increase the amount of plasmid we had. The final step would be to transform our best biobricks into Algae and Moss for further characterisation.
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Time permitting, we also originally planned to create a plasmid with built-in antibiotic resistance and the biobrick restriction sites which could be used as a standard in Synthetic Biology. The program ApE (advanced plasmid editor) was used to visualise the plasmid. We used the Ble gene conferring the Bleomycin resistance cassette for the selection marker. This confers resistance to the Bleomycin family of antibiotics (we used phleomycin to select our transformed cells). The Ble gene we used came from the Chlamydomonas Centre (USA) and this gene has been adapted for use in eukaryotic organisms, including the insertion of two introns and the addition of a 5' and 3' untranslated region (UTR).
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<h1>Project Abstract.</h1>
 
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The current aim is to genetically modify a species of algae so that it becomes luminescent when in the dark. Currently we are aiming to work with the species Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. We will simultaneously be attempting to implement the same or a similar genetic system into Escherichia coli and possibly a plant species such as Arabidopsis thaliana.
 
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• Practical applications: A system causing part or all of a plant to glow in certain situations has obvious pragmatic benefits: if a crop were designed so that when in the presence of a pathogen it emitted light, then at night a farmer would be able to quickly ascertain areas of infection.
 
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• If the system could be engineered into, for example, grass, then patches of this glowing grass could be planted along the sides of winding country roads. There are safety aspects of this to consider, including the ability of our luminescent grass to mate with other species of grass and transfer the gene system.
 
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• Energy Conservations: Imagine walking down a street where half of the lampposts have vanished and been replaced with glowing trees. This would reduce the energy required to power street lighting, lowering the carbon footprint of any town or city.
 
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• Novel applications: These are the less practical, more quirky aspects of the technology we’re creating. This includes uses such as glowing house plants, which could then be used either as nightlights for children, as romantic ‘mood setters’, or as useful homing beacons when you’re drunkenly stumbling towards your bedroom. Though these too would likely have an effect on energy consumptions of individual households, the impact would be less intense.
 
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Chlamydomonas reinhardtii.
 
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This is a single celled species of green algae. It is a eukaryotic, photosynthetic organism. It is easily transformable, either by: electroporation; the bacterium Agrobacterium tumorfaciens; glass beads; or by the use of a biolistic particle delivery system (gene gun).
 

Latest revision as of 21:19, 21 September 2011

University of East Anglia-JIC

UNIVERSITY OF EAST ANGLIA-JOHN INNES CENTRE

Bannerproject.jpg


Project Overview



Plants are an extremely versatile form of life and they are essential to the world we know. Plants, should be a major focus for Synthetic Biology due to their potential use in an array of applications from food security to the synthesis of biofuels. However the short time scale of the iGEM competition has often meant that there have been very few in previous years. There are also a great many challenges to using plants in iGEM including growth time and the complexity associated with adapting Synthetic Biology approaches for plants. As the first iGEM team at UEA and in co-operation with the JIC, we felt that we could make a significant contribution to plant based Synthetic Biology. The overall aim of our project is to help develop and where possible pioneer some of the fundamental technologies and methodologies needed to make plant based Synthetic Biology projects possible. To achieve this we hope to adapt existing Synthetic Biology approaches which are successful in Escherichia coli for use in plants.


To achieve the aim of our project we decided to work with Physcomitrella patens and Chlamydomonas reinhardtii with the intention of establishing these photosynthetic eukaryotes this year for future iGEM competitions. One of the reasons that we decided to pursue the introduction of our chosen photosynthetic eukaryotic species was due to the increased versatility of eukaryotic protein post-translational modifications. Eukaryotic post-translational modification can be vital for the successful expression of proteins. Post-translational methylation and glycosylation patterns are rarely conserved across species and never across the three Kingdoms of life. Thus, a eukaryotic protein can be produced in a given bacterial species by transferring the gene, but due to aberrant or non-existent methylation and glycosylation, will be unable to conduct the wild type functioning of the protein. Eukaryotic model organisms are therefore vital for reflecting the likely outcomes of intregrating systems composed of genes from an amalgamation of species when expressed in a eukaryotic organism.

To lay the groundwork we planned to generate an array of biobricks including; promoters, terminators and other biobricks with useful properties. We carefully designed our biobricks to utilise antibiotic resistances which could be used in both bacteria and in our photosynthetic species. We needed a strategy to help us to achieve this and so we decided to use biobricks which could give quick and definitive results, such as GFP. With this approach we could test the biobricks in bacteria before trying to transform them into our plant species. At the same time we could also grow our transformed cultures and increase the amount of plasmid we had. The final step would be to transform our best biobricks into Algae and Moss for further characterisation.

Time permitting, we also originally planned to create a plasmid with built-in antibiotic resistance and the biobrick restriction sites which could be used as a standard in Synthetic Biology. The program ApE (advanced plasmid editor) was used to visualise the plasmid. We used the Ble gene conferring the Bleomycin resistance cassette for the selection marker. This confers resistance to the Bleomycin family of antibiotics (we used phleomycin to select our transformed cells). The Ble gene we used came from the Chlamydomonas Centre (USA) and this gene has been adapted for use in eukaryotic organisms, including the insertion of two introns and the addition of a 5' and 3' untranslated region (UTR).

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