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Team:Virginia/Results
From 2008.igem.org
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NotebookWe'd like to thank our generous sponsors for making our work possible:
Results
The 2008 VGEM Team has had a very productive summer. We've designed a new technical standard, BioBrick Placeholders, that should help synthetic biologists with the assembly of composite BioBrick parts. We've synthesized inefficient terminators to serve as Genetic Attenuators, which should be a useful gene expression tool in that it can help control mRNA transcript levels. We've codon-optimized and expressed parts that code for an enzymatic pathway that produces polyhydroxybutyrate, a bioplastic. We've contributed a handful of other useful new parts including two new reporters, orange fluorescent protein (OFP) and strongly enhanced blue fluorescent protein (SBFP2), and a streptomycin resistance gene. We are currently working on incorporating our Genetic Attenuators in our PHB pathway to synthesize bioplastic.
Genetic Attenuator
We have created a template plasmid that can be used to characterize terminators for use as Genetic Attenuators. Derived from Caitlin Conboy's work characterizing terminators in the registry. The plasmid has the benefit of being able to serve as a bi-functional measurement tool. Either one can measure fluorescence from reporter proteins it contains OR the plasmid can serve double-duty in a Real Time PCR assay. Real Time PCR allows for much greater accuracy.
BioPlastic
Making plastic a renewable resource.
SDS-PAGE result for enzymes in PHB synthesis pathway. From left to right: Marker, Control, PhaA, PhaB1, PhaC1
We have modeled the kinetics of of the PHB pathway to allow us to optimize when to harvest product from cultures synthesizing PHB.
