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Team:IIT Madras
From 2008.igem.org
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Who are we?
IIT Madras, located in the port city of Chennai in India is being represented by a team led by Dr. Guhan Jayaraman from the Department of Biotechnology at IIT Madras and Dr. Mukund Thattai from National Center for Biological Sciences located in Bangalore. The team comprises 6 undergraduates working at IIT Madras. After an extensive brainstorming process, we concluded that the time is ripe to participate and be part of the synthetic biology community and with the support and sponsorship coming in from various corners, this year will signify our first entry in iGEM.
What are we working on?
Our project looks at a specific category of bacterial transcription factors, Sigma factors. These are prokaryotic transcription initiation factors that enable the specific binding of RNA polymerase to a variety of promoters. Escherichia coli sigma factors function to differentially express various sets of genes under different environmental conditions.
Our goal is to assemble a library of sigma-dependent and lac controlled promoters, and submit these to the Registry of Standard Biological Parts. This "StressKit" can be used to control gene expression specifically during each phase of the bacterial growth curve and will also give users the ability to regulate gene expression using temperature, pH and other stress inducers as external cues.
We've chosen 4 special sigma factors (S,H,F,E) in addition to the housekeeping sigma 70 to include in our library. Our design attempts to engineer the regulation achievable in lac based promoters fused with the differential expression of the sigma factor dependent promoters.
