Team:IIT-Madras
Welcome to IIT Madras's wiki for iGEM 2016!
When we started to ideate for iGEM 2016, our goals were to tackle two of the fundamental issues being faced in synthetic biology today - non-modular nature of RBSs and variations in the protein expression levels, designing an efficient measurement device. We have also designed efficient ribo switches and been using them for several potential applications like inhibition of HGT. Our final project will consist of 3 modules - RIBOS riboregulatory switches, efficient measurement device, and characterizing widely used RBSs for their modularity.
RIBOS(RNA Inducible Boolean like Output Switches) is a riboregulatory system in which presence or absence of mRNA molecules of one gene can modulate the expression of other genes. RIBOS devices are triggered by sequence specific RNA molecules and give output in the form of activation or repression of translation of specific mRNA molecules. We have designed RIBOS for scalability, orthogonality and composability. We wish to characterize RIBOS for tunability and highly precise outputs. It can be game changing in the field of synthetic biology, it's applications range from detection and quantification of mRNA molecules to the design of extensive independent and modular genetic circuits using forward engineering.
Measuring GFP, RFP and other fluorescent signals to characterize biobricks, biological devices are one of the most important part of iGEM team projects. It is well known that these measurements are rarely reproducible due to several factors including the intrinsic noise of the part or device and the extrinsic noise like variations in bacterial cell count, plasmid copy number, instrumental error and human error. We are making an efficient measurement device, which can be used to measure GFP signals while eliminating the variations in the bacterial cell count and plasmid copy number.
Promoter and RBS parts provide the driving force for protein production. Ideally, a combination of promoter and RBS should give similar expression level with different proteins. Recent research papers have shown high amount of variability in the expression levels. We are designing a model and validating it with the available data to predict the variations in the expression level. Also, we are characterizing widely used RBS parts to estimate their modularity
