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 a synthetic form of leucine for survival - hence the title of our project. To implement the system in E. coli, CRISPR Cas9 was used to knockout the native E. coli tRNA synthetase gene, and the modified synthetase gene was inserted into the bacterial cells.