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Team:ETH Zurich/Project
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Contents |
Overall project
Idea
Our project focuses on the detection of cigarette smoke from the air by E.Coli bacteria and monitoring its concentration visually by display of various lights. Our system will act as a smoke sensor and “partymeter”, telling us how a certain party progresses (under the creative assumption that the progress of the party is measured by the amount of smoke in the air).
Project description
We engineer our cells such that they can detect acetaldehyde, which is a substance found in cigarette smoke. Upon binding of acetaldehyde to AlcR, AlcR acts as an inhibitor of gene transcription. This is where our genetically engineered circuit starts. With a number of inhibitors and activators, our circuit gives rise to a GFP output upon sensing acetaldehyde in a certain range of concentration. Our circuit then acts as an acetaldehyde band-pass-filter.
We will place our genetically engineered cells in a microfluidics channel and will supply them with a constant flow of acetaldehyde. We will also design our cells to degrade acetaldehyde, such that a concentration gradient of acetaldehyde is created throughout the channel.
Since our cells detect only a certain concentration of Acetaldehyde, as the gradient moves through the channel, the GFP stripe that certain cells produce will also "move along". Furthermore, our system will act as a low pass filter which produces AHL molecules once the Acetaldehyde concentration is below a certain threshold (the lower threshold for the previously described band-pass filter). Thus, cells that are to the right of the GFP stripe will produce AHL. As the stripe moves through the channel, AHL will be always produced to its right and will diffuse in the channel. Moreover, we feed back some of the produced AHL to the channel again, by a "recycling channel", so that even the cells to the left of the stripe are supplied with AHL. As soon as the stripe moves until the end of the channel, no more cells will produce AHL and the recycling will cease after a while. The absence of AHL will trigger RFP production by all the cells. So, in our channel we should be able to see a moving green stripe and a red flash everywhere once the stripe moves to the end of it.
