Team:UIUC-Illinois

Our project is being deemed the ‘bacterial filing cabinet’. The idea is to introduce two constructs that express distinct phenotypes into the chromosome of E. coli. The single copy nature of these insertions will prevent either phenotype from being easily detectable. A phenotype will be pulled out of its dormant single copy state by excision of the construct and replication into a high copy number vector. Phenotypes can by switched by reinserting the first construct, destroying any remaining plasmid-form construct, then excising the second construct and replicating it to a high copy number. The excision and integration of each construct will be under the control of a lambdoid phage system.