<div class="col-sm-7 pagetext-L"><div class="text">To be a useful tool, the bioballoon must be made of something (membranes), it must inflate (float), and it must do something (sensors). In our sensors sub-project, we aimed to create biological means of sensing small molecules and temperature as a way of adding useful functionality to the balloon. To sense temperature we systematically measured the thermodynamic stability of a wide suite of chromoproteins and determined that many of them reliably loose color at particular temperatures. We also discovered that the effect is sometimes reversible, and some proteins also exhibit reproducible color switching properties at particular temperatures. To read more about that work, see the chromoproteins sub-project page. To sense small molecules we pursued two distinct approaches: <a href="https://2016.igem.org/Team:Stanford-Brown/SB16_BioSensor_IRES">IRES</a> and FQ sensing. Both utilize aptamers, small nucleic acids with extremely high specificity and affinity towards their target small molecule ligand as sensory domains. The approaches differed in how they reported aptamer binding. We had far more experimental success with the FQ system. To read more about our small molecule biosensing efforts, visits the <a href="https://2016.igem.org/Team:Stanford-Brown/SB16_BioSensor_IRES">IRES</a> and FQ sensor sub-project pages. </div>