Team:Yale/Demonstrate

Evolving Rhizobia to Tolerate Extreme UV radiation

We set out to see if we could use classical untargetted mutagenesis to evolve extremophile phenotypes in Rhizobia. We chose to evolve UV tolerance, as that would be a real-life situation faced by Mars tarraforming strains. We we able to successfully evolve more UV tolerate strains of Rhizobium tropici (see here for data)

Nodulating Plant Roots

Rhizobium natually are root nodulating bacteria. To test our engineered bacteria in more realistic contexts, we created an apparatus to nodulate and visualize bean roots. (see here for data)

Testing pORTMAGE in E coli

We successfully demonstrated the use of pORTMAGE to engineer E. coli via a rifampicin assay. This bodes well for using this system in rhizobium (see here for data)