We had our team registered by the start of summer, had a blast working on the project, and can't wait to go to Indianapolis!

We were sure to complete this form on the iGEM website. Additionally, we added this page to our wiki to elaborate on the judging criteria that we believe we have fulfilled.

Since the first day of summer, we have been working hard to make our wiki as easy to use and as informative as possible. For detailed information about our project, please visit the project page.
Our team has also constructed many useful and unique parts over the summer. A complete list of new parts from this year is available.

Just now, as we're finishing up the wiki, we are working on our poster and presentation. We'll have it all ready to go by the Jamboree!

We have constructed many new standard BioBrick parts this summer, all of which have a detailed description on their pages on the parts registry. Here is a link to all of the parts currently on the registry. Some of our favorite parts include our LacI mutants (K611021 through K611027) and our promoter/repressor pair characterization construct (K611018).

The majority of our parts for this year are done being constructed and are in the proper backbone (pSB1C3). DNA for our characterization plasmids (K611009-K611018), as well as three isolated LacI promoter mutants (K611023, K611025, and K611026), and all of our LacI promoter mutants in their characterization constructs (K611031-K611037) has been shipped to the Registry. We still need to order special primers to PCR out many of our mutants from the characterization plasmids before we can ship the rest of them to the Registry. We plan to have all mutants isolated and sent to the Registry as soon as possible.

Our project was centered around the generation and characterization of mutant promoters and repressors. All of the characterization plasmids (K611009-K611014 and K611018) work as designed. These parts allow any user to insert their own promoter or repressor mutants, screen them for mutant activity, and characterize their behavior for various levels of induction. For more detailed descriptions of how the characterization constructs work, see the process page or the part pages on the Registry. With these characterization plasmids, we were able to characterize the mutants generated for our project.

The characterization of our mutant promoters is what we view to be the most significant part of our project. We feel that it is very important for parts in the registry to be characterized so that any user could take the parts and confidently use them as desired. Our LacI mutants, K611021-K611027, have been tested at multiple concentrations of LacI repressor and at various levels of IPTG, which unrepresses the repressor. Additionally, we have derived relative values for each of our mutants through comparison with the LacI wildtype, R0010. We believe that with the information and characterization available on their registry pages, any user could put our mutants in various circuits with a high level of certainty in the outcome.

One of our biggest contributions to the synthetic biology community this year is our improvement of the LacI promoter, R0010. We have significantly widened the functionality of this part by adding 7 new and well characterized mutants to the registry (K611021-K611027). Each variant is different and useful in its own way, with altered characteristics such as promoter strength or repressor binding affinity. The LacI promoter and it's corresponding repressor (C0012) are two of the most commonly used parts in all of synthetic biology and having many variants of the same repressible promoter opens up a range of circuits that would be have been more difficult to create before. Additionally, these parts enable any user that wants to use a LacI repressible promoter to choose from a wide range of expression levels, rather than being limited to the wild type, which from the experience page, seemed to be the only variant until we introduced our parts.