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Team:Paris Bettencourt
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Revision as of 19:33, 21 September 2011
Using synthetic biology to investigate newly discovered biological phenomena
Subtitle here ?
The recent discovery of nanotubes between individual B.subtilis by Dubey and Ben-Yehuda spiked our interest. Through very detailed and advanced microscopy, they showed nanotubes forming between cells and that a wide rande of proteins could pass through this communication channel (GFP, calcein, antibiotics, ...). They also showed signs of communication between B.subtilis and E.coli, another species entirely. With these synthetic-biology-friendly bacterium and a potentially non-specific cell-to-cell transportation system, the possibilities for designing new systems seem endless!
Fig1: Extracts from the Dubey-Ben-Yehuda article [1]
Our goal this summer was to see how the synthetic biology community could harness the power of amorphous computation and metabolic engineering of this nanotube network. Each cell is potentially a tiny individual computer linked directly and only to its closest neighbours. The existence of the so-called nanotubes is however still debated.
We decided therefore to investigate this phenomenon and characterize it using the tools of synthetic biology . We created new B.subtilis BioBricks, filling a surprising hole in the part registry since very few iGEM teams worked on this organism in the past. Those BioBricks were used to provide new evidence supporting the existence of a nanotube network.
See our work!
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The Team:
We are fifteen students from parisian universities coming from many different disciplines who came together to participate in the iGEM competition. Come and meet the Team. |
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The project: In February, a team led by Dubey and Ben-Yehuda discovered an extraordinary new form of communication for bacteria: nanotubes between individual cells! This type of link is well known between eukaryotic cells, but here it was observed between cells widely used by synthetic biologists (Bacillus subtilis). We decided to investigate this new communication way in details using the tools synthetic biology can design. You can find out more about our project in the Project section. |
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The values:
Ethics and safety are two main concerns when building genetically engineered organisms. You can visit our Human practice work and our safety page. |
Achievements
List of all our achievements during the summer:
- Reproduced the GFP experiment of the original paper
- Reproduced the antibiotic experiment of the original paper and proposed an alternative explanation for the results
