Arizona_State
Description
For the 2017 competition, we are addressing the iGEM engineering challenge of Foundational Advancement. Our goal is to utilize quorum sensing (QS), a molecular signaling system that bacteria use to communicate, as a flexible tool for building layered, sophisticated genetic circuits. Understanding what signals specific bacteria use to communicate allows for potential progress to be made in diagnosing disease states in the body. For example, testing for biomarkers that utilize QS as a mode of communication in different types of cells may bring to light an underlying infection in a patient. Enabling greater complexity of genetic circuits will advance the entire field of synthetic biology. The project is multidisciplinary in nature, so it is a great opportunity to learn how to collaborate across specialized fields. The aim of this project is to persist through failures to harvest new bioengineering tools. Using the diverse family of quorum sensing proteins and DNA to find previously unknown connections will enable higher-order, complex genetic circuitry to be developed in the bioengineering community. A major problem with this topic is that we only have cataloged 3.8% of the ones that exist. So categorizing more would be beneficial for the community of synthetic biology. Another challenge is the issue of cross talk. In nature, we would expect that different molecules of AHLs to activate different genes. However, it is found that many of these systems cross-talk with each other and activate their unnatural system. This years project Is a continuation advancement of the 2016 ASU i-GEM’s project. ASU’s 2017 iGEM team wish to explore quorum sensing in terms of this cross talk and categorizing more senders.
