Team:Bulgaria

Project Description

With the dawn of synthetic biology and the ever increasing utilization of microfluidics in experimental practice a new understanding of single-cell biology has emerged. We now realize a lot more of the inner mechanisms that regulate individual cells.

Our team aims to make the detection of carbon, phosphate and nitrogen starvation in cultured cells easier and faster. In order to accomplish this we will insert different fluorescent protein genes in a bacterial plasmid. Those will be expressed together with Escherichia coli’s starvation genes and this way we will observe light in different parts of the spectrum according to the needs of the cell culture. After stimulating the transformed cells the fluorescence will be detected through signal monitoring system. The data will be used to visualize the level of expression i.e. the phase of starvation.

We want to make a cell culture that is cheap, easy to cultivate and that shows us exactly what it lacks in its environment. If we are successful this approach could be used in many different fields including pharmacy, bio-engineering, improving the efficiency of bioreactors in general and many more. We have our strains and successfully made our first electroporation.