Team:TU Darmstadt
iGEM TU Darmstadt 2016
Glow before you go (working title)
Project description
The critical evaluation of the project’s safety is required from each iGEM Team participating in the competition. Therefore the iGEM HQ created an entire subpage on their website where the teams can find all the necessary information, such as risk levels or general safety requirements. Unfortunately there is no chance to look up complete, working safety approaches from previous teams.
It should be easy for teams to choose a well characterized safety approach which is suitable for their own project out of a catalog and directly see how to easily incorporate it. Our project is supposed to lead the way into that direction.
In our 2016 project we focus on easily enabling teams to work safely with E.coli. By integrating genetic circuits into the E.coli genome we ensure that genetically modified bacteria cannot survive outside of the required lab with the particular conditions they need. The genetic circuit is based on the availability of an unnatural amino acid (UAA) and is regulated within two steps:
- When the concentration of the unnatural amino acid is low a reporter protein is expressed which signalizes the low level of UAA.
- When the UAA concentration reaches zero (which is also the case if bacteria get out of the lab) the expression of colicin is induced which then kills the bacteria.
Additionally we hope to facilitate and accelerate the molecular cloning process of DNA through a new standard based on the RFC10 standard. We use riboswitches to show a successful ligation without additional testing procedures.
Project brainstorming
Like every year we started our weekly team meetings in january and thought about possible projects. This year it took us a bit longer to find a project but around the end of march we were closing in on a safety project around colicin. By mid march we had our project overview and started dividing into several lab groups that focused on their individual pathways. By now the first cloning procedures have been succesful and we are looking forward to conduct first measurements.
