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From 2011.igem.org

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Google Insights suggests the most number of searches for “synthetic biology” is from India.

Yo! Veni, Vidi, Veci!

So what do we have in store for iGEM this year?
Most research and development of concepts to date has dealt with gene networks. These networks are said to be synthetic because they are novel and designed by humans, never seen in nature. This is analogous to building electronic circuits from individual components.
Recent research has however shown success in developing novel proteins and enzymes which have been designed based on the modularity of proteins. We plan to use the same principle to design an expression system that can be modified on the protein level so that it can be activated by a molecule of our choice. We want to design a novel signal transduction pathway, where the surface receptor can be modified by simply replacing the extracellular sensory domain alone, with little no change in the output pattern. This could be analogous to development of novel electronic components with novel activities not seen in nature.

We plan to target this problem by accessing the modularity found in the proteins involved in the two-component signalling pathways of prokaryotes. There are over 250 different pathways that have already been studied to a very large extent and thousands of proteins have been characterized wrt their domain architecture and their functionality.
Of the many signalling pathways that have been studied, the EnvZR Two component system of E.Coli is one of the first few to be understood. It is found to be representative of the basic domain archetecture found in many of the Two Component systems. Another pathway which we plan to assess for the suitability is the EvgSA signal also found in E.Coli.

Watch this space for more updates…