Team:WashU StLouis
SUPER CELLS
WashU and Penn State
In his famous comic series, Superman’s exposure to Earth’s yellow sun caused his cells to produce and store vast amounts of energy, thus giving him superhuman strength and abilities. All earth-bound organisms are made of cells, and they all store energy with the same simple molecule: ATP. Our team designed plasmids that would cause bacteria to overproduce ATP and other important metabolic cofactors. Our hope is that these mutant “Super Cells” can be used in a variety of fields: from protein biosynthesis to agriculture.
As a subsidiary team of The Nitrogen Project, a multi-university initiative to solve nitrate runoff through genetic engineering, the primary long term goal of our project was to design crops that require less chemical fertilizer. We met with local St. Louis farmers and environmental activists to get their impressions on genetically modified plants and learn about other solutions to the runoff problem. In the end, their input led us to search for other, wider applications of our research.
Ultimately, our project culminated in data that strongly suggested that our plasmids increased both intracellular ATP concentration and the concentration of reduced electron-transport proteins. We demonstrated that the latter could be useful for the manufacture of interesting biological products. We registered two working parts – one for ATP and one for electron transport.
Throughout the summer, we communicated with other iGEM teams to talk about our project and exchange advice. We even met up in person with some Midwest teams! We made invaluable connections, learned an incredible amount about synthetic biology, and created lifelong friendships, leading to a summer research experience that we will never forget.
