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Team:Washington/ECOLIGHTTUNE
From 2013.igem.org
Contents |
Backgrounds
The goal for this app is to make a standardized system for light control without the common problems many of the current ad hoc light projection systems come with: high cost, difficult assembly, and low reproducibility. With mobile device tablets integrating into our everyday lives, we found it fitting to develop a program to take advantage of their pervasiveness and utilize them as synthetic biology instruments.
E. colight was a tablet application designed by our iGEM 2012 team in order to project light onto bacterial cultures. This year, our team wanted to continue our 2012 project by expanding the functionality of our app, calibrate it using existing light-inducible promoter systems, and determine the maximum number of experiments we can perform on a single tablet. By designing experiments with high reproducibility that explores the strengths and limitations of the app, we hope to create the canonical system for optogenetics testing.
In addition to characterizing in depth the use of the app, we also developed new features that can accommodate a broader range of growth vessels, a vibration feature, and utilize the heat output of the processor as an incubator.
Methods
Future Plans
We have biobricked the previously published red and green light responsive systems and characterized them on our mobile tablet device. The potential applications for a mobile light-inducible expression system are numerous for researchers, iGEM teams, and also in resource-poor settings. Both complex spacial patterning and simple expression gradients are highly useful to synthetic biology community. Spacial control allows the induction of cellular patterns to simulate signalling gradients in tissue development and are useful in lithography and other pattern related technology.
Expanding the development of our light-inducing app will give iGEM researchers the ability to express gene products and initiate circuits simply with light in varying intensities for a range of expression levels. The 96-well format allows for the testing of many different constructs at the same time, greatly increasing the potential experimental throughput.
Our proposal of a a ‘hot-swappable’ designer Biobrick will allow researchers to exchange sfGFP with any custom output desired. For example, a LacZ reporter could be used with the to create conventional ‘Coliroid’ images. Additional fluorescent outputs such as RFP and CFP could be used to create separate and distinguishable signals. This will allow us to extend testing of red and green light sensors together on the same plate.
Additionally, we would test the tablet App using a blue light inducible construct for instance the LovTAP system presented in 2009 by EPF-Lausanne. Our app allows the simultaneous expression on three separate chromatic channels and is thus compatible with blue light systems. Ultimately, these three signals could be used to create trichromatic output using RFP, GFP and CFP to recreate a full color image, from black and white Coliroid to vivid color bacterial photography.
Finally, we are testing the tablet for it’s capacity to be used as a portable incubator and expression system based on it's heat output. Because of the high cost of purchasing a new incubator, we foresee this will be a boon to any iGEM team just starting out and will allow more teams to enter the competition and synthetic biology more accessible to high school programs. It also reduces the space requirements to run both educational and high-throughput expression experiments, as well as could be utilized in resource-limited settings for example to induce and record data from biosensors in remote locations. The app can be set up easily owing to the fact that many people already own a mobile tablet device and can turn it into an incubator by simply downloading it from the Google App Store.
Cloning
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Our System
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