Team:WHU-China/introduction
From 2013.igem.org
Introduction
Blueprint of our project
If people want to drive a system to work for them, even if the system is a simple one, simply keep pushing the system toward the goal may not be the best shoot. For example, if a professor is too pushing, his students may, on the contrary, unable to perform their best; if a farmer adding too much fertilizer, the land may be damaged in the long run, etc. Biological systems are extremely complex, and the components in the system are intensely interconnected. So in order to exploit the maximum potentiality of a biological system, we'll have to keep the protein or metabolic product production in a desired range. Not too high, as it may hurt the cell or inhibit its growth; either not too low, as it will be economically inefficient. So how can we reach a desired range of expression? We need to properly combine the transcription and translation initiation elements, just as an recent published Nature article suggested[1]. But that paper just used the throughly studied E.coli expression elements in E.coli. What if we are doing engineering in a non-model organism that we just have data about a handful of expression elements, can we create the elements we need? Our project proposed a way to employ a limited set of promoters to reach any desired expression level, or even switch between several expression level.Reference
[1]Mutalik, Vivek K., et al. "Precise and reliable gene expression via standard transcription and translation initiation elements." Nature methods 10.4 (2013): 354-360.