Team:Macquarie Australia

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Revision as of 07:22, 2 October 2011

Welcome

G'day from the 2011 Macquarie University iGEM group.

This year's research team will be expanding upon the research conducted by last year's iGEM team. This project involves the production of a phytochrome light switch that jumps between two different light states, acting as a reporter for ambient light conditions. We've nicknamed our work 'the switch-a-roo' as our phytochromes hop back and forth between green and blue states.

Here are some quick links to help you get started:

An overview of our Project

Head on over to our Data Page for a summary of our registered parts

Or meet the Team!

The requirements for each medal grade can be seen at the bottom of this page

Abstract

Photoreceptors are ubiquitous proteins that allow an organism to sense light. These proteins have evolved in unique environments to sense light intensity in different colour ranges. This experiment focuses on constructing a biological switch that uses two photoreceptors from separate organisms – Deinococcus radiodurans and Agrobacterium tumafaciens. The coupling of heme oxygenase supplies our photoreceptor proteins with biliverdin, allowing for the self-assembly of the switch within host systems. The switch is the first stage of a two component light sensor and when expressed at high level, there is a noticeable colour change of the cell when it is activated by light.

Medal Progress

Bronze	Silver
Registration of Team	Characterisation of our working Biobrick
Judging form	Information entered onto Main Page of Registry
Project wiki
Poster and Talk for Asia Jamboree
Submission of parts to Registry
Submission of Biobrick to Registry [number needed]

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-<p style="font: 11pt Trebuchet MS">The objective in this project is to build and characterise a biological light switch in E.coli. This will involve construction of heme-oxygenase and bacteriophytochrome BioBrick parts. In 2010 the Macquarie Team cloned bacteriophytochrome from two sources. They showed that when one was expressed, it was functionally assembled when incubated with exogenous biliverdin; able to elicit a colour change when excited with far-red light. However, the part created is not directly usable as a BioBrick as it contains an internal EcoRI site (Deinococcus radiodurans phytochrome) and 2 PstI sites (Agrobacterium tumefaciens phytochrome). As the phytochromes require binding of biliverdin to work, which is not native to E. coli, the addition of heme oxygenase is required for the production of bilivedin in E.coli. The team from last year had managed to combine a ribosome binding site (RBS) to all 3 proteins of interest. Hence, this year, we aim to convert this 3 RBS-coupled protein coding region into usable BioBricks, and couple these BioBricks together to construct our light switch. </p>
+<p style="font: 11pt Trebuchet MS"> Photoreceptors are ubiquitous proteins that allow an organism to sense light. These proteins have evolved in unique environments to sense light intensity in different colour ranges. This experiment focuses on constructing a biological switch that uses two photoreceptors from separate organisms – Deinococcus radiodurans and Agrobacterium tumafaciens. The coupling of heme oxygenase supplies our photoreceptor proteins with biliverdin, allowing for the self-assembly of the switch within host systems. The switch is the first stage of a two component light sensor and when expressed at high level, there is a noticeable colour change of the cell when it is activated by light.</p>
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