We elected to use the yeast Schizosaccharomyces Pombe as the species of use in our bio-laser. S. Pombe is a very common model organism in biological reasearch, and we had an excellent opportunity to learn from bioscientists that are very experienced with growing and manipulating these cells at the Lopez-Aviles research group, so they were a natural choice for us. There were several other reasons for us to pick this organism, however. The first one was after TU Delft reported that cell size was a possible limiting factor for lasing in their E.coli-cells [3] ; this is something the significantly larger S. Pombe cells would remedy, if this was the case. We also wanted to attempt to implement a bio-laser in a new cell type: mammalian cells and bacteria have previously been attempted to be used for bio-laser gain mediums, however as far as we can tell it has not been attempted in yeast cells before. And, finally, S. Pombe has rarely been used by iGEM-teams previously, which means the work we do here could help future teams that want to work with the organism, by testing whether existing biological parts made for Saccharomyces Pombe (the most commonly used yeast species used in iGEM) still function in another type of yeast cell.

In addition, we wanted to test the laser on a simpler system, namely a protein solution containing large amounts of sfGFP. This was partially to test the setup, but also to examine how a simple system without the cells would function compared to one containing living organisms. For this, we managed to find a particular type of sfGFP that had been modified by a His-tag, allowing for simple purification.