WHO ARE WE?

We are a team of undergraduate students from the University of Virginia with a shared interest in synthetic biology. We hail from five different states, and our majors include biology, biochemistry, chemical engineering, biomedical engineering, neuroscience, statistics, and nanomedicine engineering.

THE PROJECT

Leu-Lock

We set out to design a novel biocontainment mechanism based upon the modification of the leucyl tRNA synthetase enzyme. Our system causes the biocontained organism to be dependent upon (or locked on) a synthetic form of leucine for survival - hence the title of our project.