Team:Michigan/Design
Project Design
We started our design process by setting our team’s design goals for the project:
-The killswitch had to be temperature dependent and not require addition of an outside compound (this is a drawback of several previous killswitch designs).
-The killswitch had to be easy to integrate into cells, otherwise it couldn’t be applied practically.
-The killswitch had to take a few hours to kill the cell, otherwise it would be impossible to work with these cells at temperatures lower than 37C.
-The killswitch couldn’t place undue metabolic stress on the cells that would interfere with the actual research an end user was performing.
We then reviewed literature and the iGEM registry in search of parts that would accomplish our goals. Our initial design called for two plasmids, one with the TlpA36 promoter expressing a lambda phage repressor that held a lysozyme on the other plasmid in check. After consulting Dr. Andrew Lowell, this design was scrapped before we began cloning it because it was too impractical to have two plasmids. Eventually we settled on the design explained in depth on the Project Description page. To test if this design met our goals, we devised the experiments outlined in detail on Experiments page.
