University of Groningen

This is the website of the iGEM team Groningen. Last year the University of Groningen won the World Championship and we have the honor of defending that title. The members of our team are from different research fields. You can think about chemistry, biomedical engineering, physics, computing science, industrial engineering and last but not least biology. With such a variety of interest we have different perspectives into the problems that will need to be solved.

Silk secretion by Bacillus subtilis

The main goal of our project is to secrete silk. The Utah 2012 team successfully produced the spider silk in E.coli. So we want to use their biobrick to get the silk genes. After the production of spider silk they lysate the bacteria in order to purify the silk proteins and get the polymerization. We want to use the Sec pathway to secrete the spider silk over the cell membrane. When we succeed, it is not necessary anymore to kill the bacteria, so they can be used over and over again. The sec system is present in different organisms, but we have chosen to use Bacillus subtilis. The advantage of this organims is that we can use its capability of mobility and biofilm formation.