Team:Exeter

Exeter iGEM: Project

Biosafety is a big issue in synthetic biology. Awareness needs to be raised in the population so as to increase the confidence in this new technology and its applications. A lack of quantitative data in the area of Kill Switches is a major barrier to this. Our team have decided to extensively test the viability of kill switches, especially those currently available from the iGEM registry, to try to improve the robustness of biocontainment systems. The core of our project will be based around using simple kill switches from the registry. We are proposing to perform a continuous culture of the transformed E.coli to determine the length of time until functional loss of the kill switch gene. As the project moves further we are interested to test whether two kill switches implemented in a system provide a failsafe. We aim to test KillerRed and a new part KillerOrange, a homologue of KillerRed excited by a different wavelength of light, in isolation and together in the hope of improving the stability. In addition to this we aim to test if the stability of kill switches is improved by integration into the genome vs expression on a plasmid. Ultimately we would like to develop a new kill switch which aims to address the problems associated with them in a new way.

In our discussions about the topic of our iGEM project it became apparent that our ideas fell into two categories. The first being food security with a focus on fighting plant pathogens, the second focused on measurement. Lots of research was done into anti-fungal proteins and a delivery system by which we could attach E.coli to the fungus using a novel prokaryote-eukaryote bridge. We looked into using a viral vector to introduce a killswitch into fungal pathogen and have it spread sexually through the population. These presented what we decided were insurmountable issues for an iGEM project.