HokkaidoU Japan

iGEM 2011 Team of Hokkaido University

Intro

We further developed "Dr. E. coli": our project of iGEM 2010. Last year, we showed that Type 3 Secretion System (T3SS) works in E. coli by injecting GFP into RK13 cells. We thought this system can be applied to direct reprogramming of somatic cells among many other things.

This year we repeated previous competitions experiment, one more time showing that GFP can be really injected into a target cell with it. And then, as a second step, we tested T3SS performance and tried to make it more convenient. For this purpose we designed a plasmid backbone which can instantly produce ready-to-inject fusion proteins from ordinary biobrick part. Using it, we tried to further characterize this system by injecting characteristic proteins.

Results are still to come.

Introduction to T3SS

T3SS is a system of pathogenic gram-negative bacterium such as Salmonella, Yersinia and EPEC (entero pathogenic E. coli). Using this system bacteria can inject whole protein molecules through a syringe like organelle named T3S Apparatus. During iGEM 2010 we found that E. coli with a part of Salmonella genome library expresses T3SS functionally. This presented opportunity to work with the amazing machinery without involving pathogenic bacteria.

Plasmid Backbone for protein injection

We developed plasmid backbone which can attach tags needed for secretion and various other functions to a chosen protein biobrick. This can be used for big scale screening of various protein domains for their inject-ability.