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From 2011.igem.org

RESULTS

Our project aims at designing E. coli to sense its environment and act accordingly. In order to achieve this, we have categorized our projects into three main groups.

Sensory Module	Processing Module	Lysis Module

SENSORY MODULE

We have engineered two different sensors into E. coli. The first sensor is an optical sensor that detects the light present in the environment. We used Cph8, hybrid light receptor, as a optical sensor (Fig 1) [1]. The second sensor is to a physical sensor that would sense the temperature of the environment. We used the temperature dependent ribo-switch as a physical sensor to detect the temperature of the environment (Fig 2) [2].

Figure 1 – Efficiency of the optical sensor was evaluated by following GFP expression in the presence and absence of light.
Figure 2: The physical sensor engineered in Chop. coli helps it to differentiate between 30⁰C and 37⁰C when GFP was fused with the temperature dependent ribo-switch.
Being aware that fermentor is always maintained at 37⁰C, we assumed that the physical sensor would help Chop. coli to differentiate its environment. However, one cannot guarantee the presence of complete darkness in the fermentor. We hypothesized if the hybrid light receptor (hybrid of light receptor and osmo regulator) could also help determine the osmolarity. The fermentor is supposed to contain sugar at a higher concentration than the environment. As expected, the light receptor could sense high sugar concentration and behave similar to darkness in the presence of high sugar concentration. This would be an advantageous feature in Chop. coli.

Chop. coli can efficiently sense its environment

Temperature	Light	Osmolality