CRISPRi-on

At present, our Metabolic Gear Box, which combines CRISPRi with light sensors, only down-regulates three genes of a pathway. However, in many other cases, genes in a synthetic pathway are supposed to be up-regulated in order to acquire the most products.
A newly devised tool, CRISPR-on, has provided some inception. CRISPR-on devisers simply fuse a transcriptional activation domain with dCas9 to create a sequence-specific transcription activating tool. CRISPR-on has been proved to be effective in human and mouse. We expect to conduct similar work in our bio-factory, Escherichia coli.
Our plan is to fuse alpha factors with dCas9 protein, which has previously been proved to be a successful method to create blue-light-induced transcription factors (Camsund et al., 2011). Our design is shown below.

However, to integrate CRISPRi and CRISPR-on would never be an easy task, since sgRNA for CRISPR-on is supposed to target upstream of promoter, rendering it necessary to incorporate logical switches.

Smaller Light Sensor

Absolutely Automatic