Our Motivation

Electronic engineering has given us the television and the mobile phone, while genetic engineering has afforded us mass-scale antimalarial drugs, biofuels and an enormous range of biosensors.

More than a decade ago, Tom Knight and colleagues envisioned using 'BioBricks' to standardise synthetic biological parts. Here at Newcastle we want to return to iGEM's humble origins and come full circle. We are currently working on replacing traditional electronic components with biological alternatives. Building a series of new compatible bacterial components, we can mix and match to create electro-biological components within a breadboard.

The circuit will allow synthetic biologists to combine bacterial and electronic components to create electro-biological circuits, offering an exciting new fusion of synthetic biology and computer science. The ultimate goal is to attain consistent outputs for given inputs.

Our Achievements

• Designed new parts and documented them and their components in the iGEM registry.
• Collaborated with a number of teams and attended meet-ups in the UK and in Europe.
• Run school taster days to get 16 & 17 year olds interested in synthetic biology.
• Talked to researchers in the field and explored the ethical impact of our work.
• Submitted corrections to sequences in the registry and built on the work of past iGEM teams like Tokyo-NoKoGen 2011's use of metallothioneins and the Bielfeld 2013 team's use of porins in microbial fuel cells.
• Participated in the 2016 InterLab task completing both the plate reader and flow cytometry data collection.
• Written software to explore different aspects of our work, including how it would integrate into an electric circuit and to use as a thought experiment in exploring the ethics of our work.
• Built a 'plug 'n' play' breadboard kit to show how we imagine our components being used in the real world.
• Had a great summer!

What Next?

Bacteria and electricity have been combined before, both in iGEM and outside of it, as can be seen in microbial fuel cells. For our project we are interested in ways that we can engineer bacteria in order to sense an electrical signal, as well as ways to modulate that signal.

To allow our bacteria to respond to an electrical current we are exploiting the native heat-shock response of E. coli to couple protein synthesis to the arrival of an electrical signal. Alongside this we are using protein expression to modulate electrical signals, for example by controlling resistance or mimicking the behaviour of capacitors. This has allowed us to devise a range of bio-electronic parts which demonstrate the potential of interfacing these technologies.

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