Team:Duesseldorf/Demonstrate
Can You Be More Real?
When we started our project we used the easy-to-manipulate, single-celled eukaryote Saccharomyces cerevisiae as our model system. They are easy and quick to grow in the lab and you only need some nutrient medium and a warm incubator to keep them happy.
Additionally yeast has much in common with human cells. Particularly important is that the genes that control the cell cycle in baker's yeast (and that malfunction in tumor cells) exist in more or less the same capacity in human cells. However, this alone was not enough for us.
How can we reach a new level in our research and how can we show our project under even more realistic conditions?
We solved this good questions while we kill two birds with one stone with the magnificent idea to assemble our constructs into mammalian cells (HeLa and CHO). Thus we tested our constructs and optogenetic double-killswitch in mammalian cells to be as close as possible to the real scope. Working towards the most efficient system, we meticulously adjusted our constructs to mammalian cells, choosing the best possible mutations among many.
