Team:NUS Singapore/Future Work
Future work
Currently we have only characterized three fully functional sensors (based on stimuli such as temperature, extracellular phosphate concentration and blue light) as a proof of concept for our sensor library. In the future, we will be expanding the sensor library by characterizing more sensors into our toolkit so that we can develop this toolkit as a platform technology to make engineering kill switches much easier.
Due to time constraints, we did not fully test our kill switch for containment of engineered probiotics. However, we had successfully constructed the phosphate-temperature cascaded system with controlled IM2 (anti-toxin) production (BBa_K2447016). This means that our next step would be construction and co-transformation of our E2 standardised plasmid (BBa_K2447017) together with the earlier designed anti-toxin plasmid. The eventual aim would be to balance off the IM2-E2 interactions to elucidate proper kill switch response when the kill condition is turned 'ON'.
Moreover, the current experiments focused on E.coli as a model organism and we will be expanding our characterization into Gram positive bacteria such as Lactobacillus which are used more frequently in engineered probiotics. In terms of modelling, we will be testing more modelling tools to figure out the optimal ways to construct genetic circuits for more effective killing. Since the existing models provided by CELLO usually have high metabolic stress and longer response time, we will also be exploring the possibility of simplifying the genetic circuit via a software to circumvent such shortcomings of a CELLO system.
