Team:Cambridge/Project/Future

In one short summer the 2011 Cambridge team has produced a set of BioBrick parts to allow future researchers to explore synthetic biology applications for structural colour.

In Vivo

Working in living E. coli we have;

• Succesfully produced reflectins.
• Characterised best practices for in vivo reflectin production.

In Vitro

By engineering E. coli to overexpress reflectins we have;

• Purified reflectin and documented best practice for high purity yields.
• Made thin films which show structural colours.
• Demonstrated the rapid colour changes possible with reflectin.

Software

We contributed to the open source toolkit[http://www.gibthon.org/ Gibthon] to help create an intuitive set of programs for designing constructs, fully compatible with both BioBrick standards and newer assembly techniques.

• Greatly improved import and display of fragments.
• Added tools to allow management of uploaded parts.

Further Work

No research group has yet induced exogenously-introduced reflectin to give colour in-vivo. It is unlikely that it is folding correctly, whether over-expressed or induced at low levels. Aiding in-vivo folding, e.g. through protein engineering could restore some of the optical effects seen in the squid; it should be borne in mind however that there is excellent evidence that the protein requires an associated membrane complex for its optical function (Tao et al. Biomaterials 5, pp. 793-801).

A number of research groups are interested in developing reflectin as a novel bio-reporter. Within the squid the colour of the protein structure is dynamically altered through phosphorylation on specific residues. If this effect could be recreated in-vivo a coloured reporter could be made to result that continually reports on changes in signal.

The team have demonstrated that thin films of reflectin have interesting in-vitro properties, not least the ability to display colour from across the entire visible spectrum. Should the films be made to change colour reliably in response to e.g. an applied charge, novel displays could be formed without some of the disadvantages of current technology, such as the need for a continual backlight.