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Welcome

It's on! After some warmup experiments during the semester, our team is now fully operational, and already having trouble getting away from the lab. Follow our adventures on twitter: IGEM_EPFL

Team, remember the Todo List

Project summary

Our goal is to design transcription factors (TFs) that bind to new sequences, currently unavailable to synthetic biologists. These would allow building larger genetic circuits than currently possible, with more independently regulated genes. The new transcription factors will be derived from tetR, one of the better characterised TFs. To characterise them, the tetR mutants and their corresponding mutant promoter are introduced into the circuit illustrated below, containing a LacI inverter and a reporter gene. The reporter for in vitro experiments is a fluorescence gene such as GFP, and a lysis system for in vivo experiments. The latter lyses cells with effective transcription factors, so that exclusively their DNA can be recovered.

We aim at engineering transcription factors so that they can recognize new binding sequences. We are making TetR mutants and different TetR recognition sequences, later characterizing each mutant with a MITOMI experiment. We are building a swith with TetR and LacI that will activate either RFP or a lysis cassette.