Wiki Highlights

• Read our project description and summary on our Project page: more details on how team members completed work for the three sections of our project are on Design, Synthesize, and Test pages, respectively.

• Results of all parts of our project (including our biobricks) are located on our Results page, along with an Attributions and Acknowledgments section.

• Human practices can be found on our Human Practices page.

• Please be sure to stop by our poster during the poster session with any questions.

Accomplishments

Experimental Results:

✓ Researched zinc finger proteins and choose 6 novel, clinically relevant target sequences
✓ Generated 55,000 zinc finger protein sequences using bioinformatics
✓ Used three recently developed technologies together for the first time: a foundational advance
✓ Expressed those 55,000 sequences in E.coli, with a sub-library for each target
✓ Created a genomic one-hybrid selection system sensitive enough to detect one hit in a million
✓ Found up to 15 novel zinc finger proteins

Biobricks and Protocols:

✓ Submitted 5 Biobricks to the registry, including our one-hybrid selection strain
✓ Created several chassis for our Biobricks, including our one-hybrid selection strain
✓ Used and shared our easy-to-follow protocols
✓ Made protocols, Biobricks, and source code freely available, so that others can adapt them for other projects

Human Practices

✓ Interviewed zinc finger researchers Dr. Keith Joung and Dr. George Church
✓ Researched intellectual property and how it applies to zinc finger proteins
✓ Created a timeline and case study of zinc finger intellectual property
✓ Handed out IP pamphlets and chassis data sheets at our poster presentation
✓ Educated local high school students about synthetic biology to provide accurate information from sources other than the media.

Our foundational advance is how we brought together novel technologies to create a pipeline that allows scientists to engineer novel interactions with DNA. This is a new way of making new parts: using selection on a computationally designed library. The genome is the next frontier in synthetic biology, and we want the iGEM and synthetic biology communities to use these techniques: we have provided detailed protocols on using lambda red and MAGE.