• Home

• Team

  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Official Team Profile
  • Press

• Project

  • The Project
  • Modeling
  • Lab Journal
  • Lab Protocols
  • Modeling Journal

• Data

  • Data Page

  • Our BioBricks

    • Stress Sensor
    • LacI+pLac +mCherry
    • rrnB P1
    • relA
  • BioBricks Used
  • Defective Biobricks
  • Modeling Results

• Safety

• Attributions

• Sponsors

Introduction

iGEM is the premiere international competition in Synthetic Biology for university students, this year with more than 160 teams from all over the world. For the first time, a Norwegian team is participating! Our team, consisting of students from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) are really excited to be able to compete, and we are very much looking forward to honing our skills in synthetic biology. Our project idea is based on using the alarmone [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guanosine_pentaphosphate ppGpp] to detect stress in E. coli, and basically make it turn red with anger!

Project description

The idea

The stringent response in bacteria is caused by amino-acid starvation, fatty acid limitation, iron limitation, heat shock and other stress conditions. As a response under these conditions, in vitro studies have suggested that the alarmone guanosine tetraphosphate (ppGpp) increase to modulate transcription to promote survival. The increase in ppGpp levels causes a redirection of transcription so that genes important for survival are favoured at the expense of those required for growth and proliferation [1].

So, could we use ppGpp as signal molecule to find out when cells are stressed?

The solution

Our system will be based on a promoter that is important for regulating growth and proliferation. At the moment we are trying to use the rrnB-p1 promoter, which has been shown in earlier studies to be highly regulated by the ppGpp molecule. Hopefully the promoter will be down regulated enough by increased levels of ppGpp to turn the repressor lacI it controls completely off. The lacI represses a second promoter lacP that induces the production of a red fluorescent protein (mCherry) and turns the cells red. For a detailed overview of our system, see the figure below.

Optimal conditions: Under optimal conditions the rrnB P1 promoter promotes transcription of green fluorescent protein (GFP) and lacI. LacI represses the lacI/pL promoter and leads to no further transcription. Green germs.

Stressful conditions: Under stressful conditions the ppGpp concentration of the cells will increase and lead to repression of the rrnB P1 promoter. The lacI/pL promoter will no longer be repressed and start the transcription of mCherry. Red germs.

Reference:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0966842X05000788 1 Magnusson, L. U., A. Farewell, et al. (2005). "ppGpp: a global regulator in Escherichia coli." Trends Microbiol 13(5): 236-242

Sponsors

We are very grateful for the generous support for our team, without which it would be difficult to compete. Our proud sponsors are:

[http://www.ntnu.edu/bioinformatics/pbi Programme for Bioinformatics, NTNU]

[http://www.ntnu.edu/rector NTNU Rector's Office]