Team:Valencia

Hot Yeast

Valencia iGEM '08 Team heats it up in your lab!!!

Tired of forgetting to keep our plates on the stove and therefore losing all of our work we thought, wouldn’t it be great to have culture that heats itself up? This idea was the basis for our project.

Heat production in UCP-1-expressing yeasts

The present project aims to demonstrate that the temperature of a microbial culture might be modulated through the expression of the mammalian uncoupling protein UCP-1. Saccharomyces cerevisiae strains genetically modified to express wild type UCP-1, mutant sequences with increased uncoupling activity, as well as a control strain were cultured in an Liquid Culture Calorimeter (LCC) we developed. The system consisted of a modified thermo flask with an inserted thermocouple allowing real-time accurate temperature measurements. Different conditions, such as initial densities, amounts of inductor, or shaking speeds were tested. We succeeded to obtain significant temperature increases in the mutant strains compared with the other strains. We also developed an effective model of our system which characterizes it from the mathematical point of view. Although the system is not always stable and might be sensitive to external perturbations, this is the first time a significant increase in temperature associated to UCP-1 expression in yeast is reported.

Acknowledgements

We are students from Universidad de Valencia and Universidad Politécnica de Valencia. Our team is made up of:

• Six Student Members: two undergraduate biology students, one undergraduate biology and chemistry student, one undergraduate biotechnology student and two graduate civil engineers.
• Four Instructors.
• Four Advisors.

The Team

Lab Notebook