Team:Pittsburgh/Proof
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Our proposed mechanism works!
Our proposed circuit to sense heavy metals involves several parts, as described in the Project Overview. First, the presence of the target metal allows the DNAzyme to cleave its substrate. The cleavage product then activates the toehold switch, which produces T3 RNA polymerase. The T3 then translates the reporter protein and activates an amplification system. Our experiments show that the metal detection section of the circuit works as expected; that is, the presence of a metal causes DNAzyme cleavage, and the cleavage product activates the toehold switch to produce LacZ. As shown below, LacZ expression is above background only when there is lead present with the DNAzyme.
