Team:Duesseldorf/Demonstrate
Can You Be More Real?
When we started our project we used the easy-to-manipulate, single-celled eukaryote Saccharomyces cerevisiae as our model system. They are easy and quick to grow in the lab and you only need some nutrient medium and a warm incubator to keep them happy.
Additionally, yeast has much in common with human cells. Particularly important is that the genes that control the cell cycle in baker's yeast (and that malfunction in tumor cells) exist in more or less the same capacity in human cells. However, this alone was not enough for us.
How can we reach a new level in our research and how can we test our project under even more realistic conditions?
We solved these good questions while killing two birds with one stone with the magnificent idea to express our constructs in mammalian cells (HeLa and CHO). Thus, we tested our constructs, an optogenetic double-killswitch, in mammalian cells to be as close as possible to the real scope. Working towards the most efficient system, we meticulously adjusted our constructs to mammalian cells, choosing the best possible mutations among many.
