Team:Wisconsin-Madison/projectoverview

The UW-Madison iGEM team is working on a biofuel biosensor project for 2011. This project ultimately breaks down into several smaller projects, each described in greater detail in their respective sections: an ethanol sensor, an alkane sensor, directed evolution construct for each sensor, and bacterial microcompartments (BMCs). Our biosensing systems are designed to produce a red fluorescent protein (RFP) in the presence of whatever they are designed to sense; in our case, either ethanol (EtOH) or n-alkanes. These two compounds are frequently used for biofuel. Currently, common laboratory chromatography techniques are used to characterize biofuel production commercially. By using biosensors, we hope to provide an accurate, cheaper, and less time-consuming method of assessing biofuel production.

Learn more about biosensors.

About the image: Typical plate reader setup to test the efficacy of our EtOH sensor. Each lane is a sample, which was run in triplicate. The outer ring is blank media to prevent evaporation of the center samples.