Team:Hong Kong-CUHK/Project/overview

Project Overview

Halorhodopsin, a light-driven ion pump originated from Halobacterium, employs light to transport chloride ions into cells uni-directionally against osmolality. Since chloride ion is a ubiquitous and essential element in most biological systems, halorhodopsin has thefascinated property to transform solar energy, the most abundant energy in theworld, into intracellular chloride ion level. However, this specificity of halorhodopsinhasn’t been well regulated and characterized in the previous competition. It is of our great interest to characterize its properties, and eventually utilize them in our project, seeking the possibilities tobenefit synthetic biology and the human society.

In our project, we integrated halorhodopsininto functional biobricks. Based on the characterized properties ofhalorhodopsin, we have furthermore developed and implemented two innovativeapplications: Light-coupled computer-aided expression platform and entropy-mixingelectrical power generation. The exciting results show us the power and thepotential of this fascinating tool. We are glad to introduce our achievements inthe project session.

Besides the proof-of-conceptdesigns in our projects, any design with the linkage of light and chloride ionscan be accomplished by this tool. Thus, there are much more potentialapplications development. We believe that halorhodopsin would be an excitingand useful biobrick in the future.