Team:MIT/Experiments/Promoters

How does endometriosis respond to hormones?

Estrogen

There are endogenous estrogen receptors in two forms: ER-alpha and ER-beta. When a healthy cell senses estrogen, the ER-alpha receptor is activated and triggers downstream responses by binding to different sites, such as an estrogen responsive element. Diseased cells respond in the same fashion as healthy cells.

Progesterone

There are also endoegenous progesterone receptors in two forms: PR-A and PR-B. When a healthy cell senses progesterone, its PR receptors are activated and trigger downstream responses by binding to different sites, such as a progesterone responsive element. However, in a diseased cell, while progesterone is present, it does not co-activate the progesterone receptors, and in turn does not result in any downstream effects.

How can our circuit detect hormones?

An important aspect of synthetic biology is having inducible systems so that the output is not produced constitutively. Since progesterone is a key biomarker of endometriosis and also one of the two components of the menstural cycle. We wanted to use the sensing of progesterone as a way to inhibit our system. In contrast we wanted to use the sensing of estrogen to activate our system. Currently, there had been some research on hormone inducible promoters, but this is largely lacking in the field of synthetic biology. We decided to tackle this problem by developing our own synthetic promoter, which was based off of the key components of the commmonly used synthetic promoter, Tetracyclin Response Element promoter (TRE). We kept the basic promoter elements, but rather than having tetO responsive sites, we used progesterone and estrogen responsive elements (PRE's and ERE's respectively.

Read more about our design desicions for our inducible promoters: pERE, pPRE, and pHybrid.

Do our synthetic promoters work?

SOme text goes here ya know. Images should be from Zeiss -- ideally both mcf7 and tHESC

Read more about our experiments testing the functionality of our promoters.

MCF7 Induction of pEREx3 - eYFP

tHESC Induction of pEREx3 - eYFP