Team:Washington/Description
Description
Tell us about your project, describe what moves you and why this is something important for your team.
What should this page contain?
- A clear and concise description of your project.
- A detailed explanation of why your team chose to work on this particular project.
- References and sources to document your research.
- Use illustrations and other visual resources to explain your project.
Our draft project description: We have decided to continue our previous year's project.
Viva la Violacein – a Real-Time Metabolics Tracker
Abstract: Synthetic biology can be used to create new, cost-effective, metabolites resulting from metabolic pathways. However, managing cultures containing these metabolic pathways is difficult and time-consuming. Constantly measuring and adjusting culture conditions in order to produce a desired metabolite in a specific quantity is both tedious and labor intensive. Furthermore, modern assays that accomplish this, such as high precision liquid chromatography, can also be prohibitively expensive.
Our project aims to reduce the amount of time and effort needed to maintain cultures through real-time, automated analysis of metabolic products in an adjustable turbidostat. This includes the creation of an affordable image analysis system that reads visual data to measure the current state of a culture and then provide feedback to release inducers to alter the expression of the metabolic pathway.
Our project utilizes the violacein pathway as a pigment-based proxy to predict the production of other metabolic pathways. By regulating gene expression within the Violacein gene set with two different inducible promoters, we are able to yield up to four different color outputs. These outputs are measured by an open-sourced Raspberry Pi setup, which captures visual data, calculates feedback based on the culture’s RGB value, and then directs the gradual release of inducer chemicals to maintain or change the culture’s color over time. Therefore, this process allows us to better understand the relationship between gene expression and actual metabolite production rate.
Currently, yeast strains capable of coexpressing both a violacein and a non-visible pathway are being cloned. In addition to this, a machine comprised of 3D-printed syringe pumps, a turbidostat, and image analysis software is in development. By combining biological, software, and hardware systems, we expect our unique design to be able to generate previously unavailable visual data in certain biosynthesis processes, such as those involved in antibiotic production or fermentation.
We are looking for collaborations! If you would like to collaborate, please email us at uwigem@uw.edu!
Advice on writing your Project Description
We encourage you to put up a lot of information and content on your wiki, but we also encourage you to include summaries as much as possible. If you think of the sections in your project description as the sections in a publication, you should try to be consist, accurate and unambiguous in your achievements.
Judges like to read your wiki and know exactly what you have achieved. This is how you should think about these sections; from the point of view of the judge evaluating you at the end of the year.
References
iGEM teams are encouraged to record references you use during the course of your research. They should be posted somewhere on your wiki so that judges and other visitors can see how you thought about your project and what works inspired you.
Inspiration
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