Team:LambertGA

Home

Team

Collaborations

Project

Description Design Experiments Proof of Concept Results Notebook

Parts

Basic Parts Composite Parts

AttributionsSafety

Human Practices

Silver Gold Integrated Practices Engagement

Awards

Hardware Measurement Model

Characterization of Nonlysosomal Proteolysis

Micronutrient deficiencies are undoubtedly one of the leading causes of death in the world. Today, according to the WHO, more than 2 billion people - over 30% of the world’s population - suffer from micronutrient deficiencies. However, diagnosing these deficiencies has proved to be extremely expensive and in some cases, very time consuming. To address this growing concern, medical professionals and synthetic biologists have created simple, inexpensive “biosensors” that serve as handy diagnostic tests to use in the field. Nevertheless, these versatile tools still suffer many errors that often yield inaccurate results and even lead to faulty diagnosis. With this in mind, the 2016 Lambert iGEM Team focused primarily on how to enhance existing biosensors and subsequently aid in the diagnosis of micronutrient deficiencies throughout the world.

Accordingly, we studied protein degradation and devised a “Switch” that prevents the overexpression of specific reporters in biosensors in order to fine tune the overall accuracy of biosensors. By using SsrA degradation tags, we characterized ClpXP, a protease involved in non-lysosomal proteolysis in many prokaryotes, to quantify the relative strength of degradation in GFP and purple chromoproteins.