Team:ETH Zurich/Collaborations

PAVLOV'S COLI

COLLABORATIONS

FREIBURG

Figure 1: kill-switch overview

We have been in contact with the Freiburg team since the beginning of the iGem adventure. We quickly realized that our respective project were going in the same direction, as we were both focusing on Colitis ulcerosa and engineering bacteria to fight diseases in vivo. However unlike us Freiburg is focusing on finding a way to facilitates local activation of targetted drug-delivery, and uses spores of Bacillus subtilis.

After several Skype meetings we figured out that the best way to join our forces on the project was to share our experience in modeling. We designed and provided them a full deterministic characterization of the kill-switch essential to the circuit bio-safety. The kill-switch is design based on the MazE/F gene mechanism, and is activated under aTc induction.The MazEF system is natively found in E.Coli and Bacillus Subtilis. The system consists in two adjacent genes mazE and mazF located downstream the relA gene. MazE and MazF are co-transcribed under a Pmaz promoter.

MazF is a toxin while MazE is the anti-toxin. The MazEF complex also inhibits the Pmaz promoter. The idea of the switch is to synthesize under certain conditions the anti-MazE protein which prevents translation of the MazE protein. Thus it will prevent it from binding MazF. The concentration of MazF in the circuit will increase and lead to cell death.

For More information on their amazing project, please click on the link below:

UI INDONESIA

We had a skype meeting with UI Indonesia and gave them an introduction to parameter estimation approaches.

SINGAPORE

The Singapore iGem team works on dual sensor E. Coli targeting cancer cells in Lactate environment. We provided them with plasmids from ETH_Zurich 2015 team.

Thanks to the sponsors that supported our project: