Plant Promoter Project

As plants are still novel organisms for most of synthetic biology, we we are interested in developing methods of control for our projects. Currently the Cauliflower Mosaic Virus 35S promoter is the most widely used plant promoter. In hopes of increasing the availability of plant promoters, our project aims at testing viral promoters due to their relative efficiency, as well as cytoskeletal protein promoters due to their natural abundance. Testing these promoters in parallel with the CaMV 35S will create a plant promoter catalog which can be used for future iGEMers exploration of plant synthetic biology.

Introduction

Promoters are the one of the basic units of a genetic circuit. They tell an organism where genes start within the genome. Promoters can also act as one of the basic regulation mechanisms for the gene the precede. They can control how much the gene is expressed, and subsequently how much protein is produced. Certain sequences can accompany promoters and allow regulatory proteins to bind around promoters, further regulating the expression of the gene they preceded.

Understanding how different promoters regulate can be useful for tailoring the expression of genes in a synthetic system. Promoter have been categorized before for bacteria. An example of this is the J23100 family of promoters in the parts registry which allow someone to control the expression of their genetic circuit. The goal of this project was to explore promoter expression in plants.

Background

...

Method

...

Results

...

Discussion

...

Further Study

...

Back to top