Developed a brand new instrument: LCC (Liquid Culture Calorimeter) for real-time, high precision measurement of the internal temperature of a thermically isolated liquid culture. This instrument is a new technical standard that supports the characterization of other temperature-related BioBricks Parts or Devices.
Characterized four new biobricks (a UCP-expressing yeast, a control strain and two mutant strains with enhanced uncoupling activity) through temperature measurements with the LCC, as well as from relative growth data of the yeast cultures.
Outlined a new approach to Human Practices in Synthetic Biology by writing a Proposal for a Code, that includes a novel concept: concentric ethical units, that might be very useful not only for the Hot Yeast Project but also for any Synthetic Biology research.
Developed an effective model to characterize the kinetic behavior of thermogenin. This model describes UCP1 functionality in terms of heat production. In future, the obtained values for the parameters can be used by other groups which intend to incorporate this part in their constructions.
Provided help to the community as much as our knowledge permitted. Bearing in mind that this was our third participation on the iGEM competition, we felt that it was our responsibility to help other teams as much as we could. At beginning of September, we mailed the team of Bologna, EPF-Lausanne and Paris regarding a fluorescent phenomenon known as [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorescence_resonance_energy_transfer FRET] that could give problems in experimental results interpretation. We knew of that phenomenon from our project in [http://parts.mit.edu/igem07/index.php/Valencia iGEM 2007], and since then are very cautious in designing systems that have two fluorescent proteins on the same cell.
Further work:
Regulation of the thermogenin-associated thermal increase could be performed using heat and/or cold shock protein promoters. These promoters, controlling genes responsible of activation or inhibition of thermogenin or another protein involved in the proton gradient might be used to mantain the temperature of the cultures within a given range.
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