Team:Paris Bettencourt/RNA

RNA Organelle

RNA Aggregation

In synthetic biology, we are often introducing new pathways to bacteria that do not naturally express them. The novel pathway will produce exotic enzymes and proteins which the host bacteria will not necessarily have the internal environment to organise these macromolecular products, this could be detrimental to the performance of both the pathway and the organism itself. Additionally, depending on the organism used, the activity of the pathway can vary and be difficult to characterise against other models used. Thus, we aim to standardize the microenvironmental activity of different pathways within the cell by localising the associated enzymes/proteins in an RNA based structure, leading to the pathway to act in a predictable way, regardless of the organism.
Fig. 1
RNA are light cost single-stranded strings nucleotides that can be expressed into the cytoplasm of the cell. Normally, RNA is used as a script of code to be processed by ribosomes in order to create specific proteins although interestingly, recent findings have shown that RNA that contain triplet repeats, as seen in the figure to the left, can aggregate together through its base pairing. The aggregation of the RNA will lead to densely packed structures that have been characterised to have liquid-liquid phase separated properties.

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Centre for Research and Interdisciplinarity (CRI)
Faculty of Medicine Cochin Port-Royal, South wing, 2nd floor
Paris Descartes University
24, rue du Faubourg Saint Jacques
75014 Paris, France
bettencourt.igem2017@gmail.com