Team:Cambridge

Welcome to the Cambridge iGEM 2011 team's wiki!

If you would like to contact the Cambridge iGEM 2011 team, please send us an email or find us on [http://twitter.com/#!/Cam_iGEM_2011 Twitter].

Project outline here. Tell us more about your project. Give us background. Use this as the abstract of your project. Be descriptive but concise (1-2 paragraphs)

Bacteriadescence - Reflectin' the Future

Reflectins are a recently identified protein family rich in aromatic and sulphur-containing amino acids, responsible for the 'reflective' camouflage exhibited by certain cephalopods. To date, researchers have isolated the protein, reproduced it using Escherichia coli and shown it to exhibit self-assembling behaviour which lead to dynamic manipulation of incident light.

Under in-vitro conditions Kramer et. al produced thin films, photonic gratings and fibres which exhibited structural colour which extended across the visual spectrum by varying the thickness. In particular the colour change was demonstrated to be reversible. It is hypothesized the colouration is a result of thin film interference.

Within the squid Loligo pealeii, Morse et.al found a multi-layer alternating structure of iridophore platelets containing spherical reflectin and extracellular space with different refractive indices. By studying tissue samples in-vitro the researchers observed conformation changes in the multi-layer structure due to phosphorylation allowed dynamic control of colour.

As part of our iGEM project we propose to express reflectin in-vivo within Escherichia coli to reproduce the same multi-layer structure. Further we wish to demonstrate the ability to tune structural colour in-vivo through phosphorylation.

WIKI NEWS

Notebook replaced by the Blog. Check the safety page! Now we have some protocols also.

Editing the wiki

Please feel free to edit the wiki. It's pretty straightforward really - it's a glorified text editor! Don't worry about wanting to make stuff private or invisible, this doesn't have to be professional at all at the moment, so work away. To make a new page with all the right formatting, navigate to the page you want to create, click edit (you have to be logged in) and paste the following into the edit box, then work away. (I find [http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Contents this] helpful.)

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