Team:WHU-China/Project/Overview

    Stepping into the IGEM world for the first time, we studied a huge amount of previous projects and found that light sensing bacteria kept arousing general interest but remain an unsettled issue. Despite the great efforts made by previous teams, little progress was made in this field. Therefore we decide to make some attempts. We focus on constructing colorful E.coli.
    Firstly, we came up with the idea of “colorful E.film” based on previous research of bio-imaging. The greatest advantage of our “E.film” against traditional chemical film is the extremely small size of pixels. And we hope to create a colorful film instead of a black-and-white one by constructing three E.coli strains which can produce and secrete three primary colors respectively in the presence of different lights. The combination of various concentrations of the primary colors will yield a colorful picture. Therefore, if we use a color picture as an input signal, the output will be the copy of it on the plate. The whole system works as a camera.
    Secondly, we plan to engineer a light signal producing machine. We designed two separate systems and try to coordinate them: the oscillator system and the signal transformation system. After chemical signals (variation of GFP concentration) are generated by the oscillator system periodically, the transformation system transforms them into light signals. Compared with chemical signals, light signals have several advantages: they can travel without liquid media and can be more easily tested. If connected with another strain of bacteria which can react to the signals, our system may be able to control the behaviors of other bacteria through light. This can be of great significance in automatically manipulating bacteria’s behaviors.
    Currently, we have already done pre-experiments and in the next period we will try our best to make the system work. We hope that our colorful E.coli that weaves time and space will shine this year.
    We will keep updating information about our experiments.
    Look forward to your attention!

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