Team:Uppsala-Sweden

About our project

The aim of our project is to regulate gene expression by three different wavelengths and further on build a bacterial system that will act like a bacterial photocopier. With this project we will participate in the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition (iGEM), arranged by MIT, Boston.

The laboratory part of this project is to further develop the light induced regulation of gene expression. We will start out by repeating the multichromatic experiments explained in the article Multichromatic Control of Gene Expression in Escherichia coli (Voigt et al. 2011) with minor modifications. The first step is to request and construct the DNA for at least three light-sensing systems, each with different activation wavelengths and different outputs. Then we test each light-sensing system individually in a bacteria platform. It means we test red, green and blue light sensing separately. Once this is done, we plan to express the three light-sensing systems in the same platform, at the same time and test their ability put together. The laboratory work includes tasks such as plasmid preparations, transformations, BioBrick cloning, mutagenesis and sequencing.

The ultimate goal is by these three different wavelengths make the bacterial cultures create a picture on an agar plate and thereby act like a photocopier.

Besides this, we will also put a lot of efforts into other parts of the project including software tool development, marketing, human practice biosecurity, bio-ethics and website.


For more information about previous Uppsala iGEM teams, have a look at UU-IGEM-2009 and UU-IGEM-2010