Team:Rutgers

From 2011.igem.org

Etch-a-Sketch The Etch-a-Sketch project aims to create a lawn of bacteria that can be drawn on with a laser pointer. This seemingly inconsequential task actually presents many interesting engineering challenges. In particular, the bacteria need to be extremely sensitive in order to respond to a short light pulse from a laser, but they still must be “selective” enough to use in ambient lighting. We have designed a novel genetic switch that we hope will tackle these problems. If our work proves successful, it will serve as a useful model for future projects that require massive signal amplification. For example, researchers creating biosensors may find our work very helpful.

Full Adder The Full Adder project seeks to create bacteria that can mimic a digital full adder. Since many teams have difficulty creating even something small like a XOR gate, this project would seem nearly impossible. However, we have found that the problem can be greatly simplified if we use a certain simple “encoding” on the outputs of the full adder. Subsequently designing a circuit to “decode” our circuit’s output will hopefully prove significantly easier than creating a complete full adder outright. Our insights may prove useful to any genetic engineer or synthetic biologist working on highly complex systems.

MYS!S A major problem with the current Parts Registry is that many parts do not strictly conform to the BioBrick standard, which makes certain operations extremely difficult. MYS!S is a tool that will analyze DNA sequences and automatically generate primers for site-directed mutagenesis to remove offending restriction sites with silent mutations (in coding sequences of course). It also contains a module to generate primers for site-directed mutagenesis to optimize codons for a given organism.