Difference between revisions of "Team:Missouri Rolla"

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<h1> Missouri University of Science and Technology iGEM Team 2017 </h1>
 
<h1> Missouri University of Science and Technology iGEM Team 2017 </h1>
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<p>We aim to harness the passive accumulation of soil and groundwater contaminants in plants for the detection of pollutants. Plant-based biosensors have immense benefits over analytical chemistry or potentiometric techniques because they continuously sample a large volume of the environment, provide warning to laypeople, and achieve the amazing specificity and sensitivity of biomolecules.
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<p>Plant-based biosensors have immense benefits over analytical chemistry or potentiometric techniques for a variety of reasons. Plants have an inherent biological property of taking up chemicals over time and have access to a large sample of groundwater, which allows them to be more accurate than many market available testers - which often do not test for particulates or at very low concentrations. A biosensor has the added benefit of not compromising ease of use when increasing accuracy. When an appropriate indicator is selected, the average person should be able to look at a plant and immediately notice that a contaminant is present.</p>
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We are developing two approaches to biosensing contaminants with plants. Trees' uptake of pollutants through extensive root systems is currently utilized for groundwater monitoring by analyzing cores taken out of trees in a laboratory. Our engineered Escherichia coli would live off tree sap in a filtered insert to these holes and change color through a chromo- or fluorescent protein when the pollutant is detected in the tree tissue. Meanwhile, our standalone Arabidopsis thaliana plants would signal the presence of a pollutant by degrading its green chlorophyll and expressing a chromo- or fluorescent protein. Both systems are based on important developments in biosensors, namely the creation of synthetic signal transduction systems in bacteria and plants and the redesign of natural periplasmic binding proteins for the detection of new ligands. Taken together, these advances could allow a computationally-designed periplasmic binding protein which binds a contaminant of interest extracellularly to transfer the signal through a phosphorylation cascade and produce a transcriptional response. We will create circuits to implement these synthetic signal transduction systems, attempt to computationally design periplasmic binding proteins for new ligands, and test the efficacy of our two biosensing approaches. We hope our final systems will strongly transcribe our reporter in an orthogonal detection which is obvious to the eye.</p>
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<img class="notgelpic" src="https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2017/c/cb/T--Missouri_Rolla--plants.jpg" />
 
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<p>Our team selected Arabidopsis as the system for our biosensor and trichloroethylene, or TCE, as our first contaminant of interest. Trichloroethylene is the most common groundwater contaminant in the United States, contaminating between 9 and 34% of drinking water in the US. TCE has been classified as a carcinogen; many of its biological metabolites are highly reactive and have cancerous effects to specific organs. A plant that could be placed outside of factories possibly releasing TCE, or even a house plant to be watered by from the tap drinking water, could prove to be a powerful agent in reducing the amount of TCE consumed by humans.</p>
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<p>Though we focused first on TCE, ideally our system could spread to a variety of groundwater or drinking water contaminants. The system is based on important developments in biosensors, namely the creation of synthetic signal transduction systems in plants and the redesign of natural periplasmic binding proteins for the detection of new ligands. So simply, a plant is exposed to contaminated water, a designed periplasmic binding protein binds that protein, a signal transduction pathway causes a reporter piece of DNA to be triggered, which in our case will lastly de-green the plant, meaning that the plant will turn almost clear when exposed to the contaminant. This will become obvious to any observer, and they can then begin to take the next necessary precautions.</p>
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Missouri_Rolla

Missouri University of Science and Technology iGEM Team 2017

Plant-based biosensors have immense benefits over analytical chemistry or potentiometric techniques for a variety of reasons. Plants have an inherent biological property of taking up chemicals over time and have access to a large sample of groundwater, which allows them to be more accurate than many market available testers - which often do not test for particulates or at very low concentrations. A biosensor has the added benefit of not compromising ease of use when increasing accuracy. When an appropriate indicator is selected, the average person should be able to look at a plant and immediately notice that a contaminant is present.

Our team selected Arabidopsis as the system for our biosensor and trichloroethylene, or TCE, as our first contaminant of interest. Trichloroethylene is the most common groundwater contaminant in the United States, contaminating between 9 and 34% of drinking water in the US. TCE has been classified as a carcinogen; many of its biological metabolites are highly reactive and have cancerous effects to specific organs. A plant that could be placed outside of factories possibly releasing TCE, or even a house plant to be watered by from the tap drinking water, could prove to be a powerful agent in reducing the amount of TCE consumed by humans.

Though we focused first on TCE, ideally our system could spread to a variety of groundwater or drinking water contaminants. The system is based on important developments in biosensors, namely the creation of synthetic signal transduction systems in plants and the redesign of natural periplasmic binding proteins for the detection of new ligands. So simply, a plant is exposed to contaminated water, a designed periplasmic binding protein binds that protein, a signal transduction pathway causes a reporter piece of DNA to be triggered, which in our case will lastly de-green the plant, meaning that the plant will turn almost clear when exposed to the contaminant. This will become obvious to any observer, and they can then begin to take the next necessary precautions.