Figure 1 shows the predicted secondary structures of the two synthetic RNATs implemented in our project. So far, we detected fluorescence only with the 37ºC responsive RNAT, which controls mCherry's translation.
Figure 2 shows the visual appearance of cultures grown at 37ºC containing the 37ºC RNAT_mCherry construction (figure 2a), a non-fluorescent control (figure 2b), and a standard constitutively expressing RFP (figure 2c).
Fluorescence of cultures carrying our construction increases almost 4x from 31 to 37ºC (figure 3).
Surprisingly, we obtained different behaviors in clones transformed with the same DNA (figure 4). We identified variations in plasmid copy number as the potential cause of phenotypic discrepancies among clones.
What is in the charts?
All our experiments were performed in E. coli K12. For each measure in a given temperature, the system was left until a point in which we were sure the O.D of the cell culture and the production of the protein were in equilibrium, steady, and uniform, before the cells population started to decrease (which we found was 17h).
The charts in our wiki show the fluorescence of our constructions relative to a standard constitutively expressing RFP, with values that go from 0 to 1. We took as a standard for the RFUs the amount of fluorescence emitted by an E. coli K12 culture transformed with a constitutively expressed part BBa_E1010 (the amount of fluorescence emitted by our culture was calculated by dividing the fluorescence of the sample by the fluorescence of the standard). Fluorescence values of a non-fluorescent control (noise) were subtracted from each measurement before calculating the relative fluorescence.