Team:IIT Madras

'Who are we'

IIT Madras team overview

'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 contorlled 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 houskeeping sigma 70 to include in our library. Our design attempts to engineer the regulation achievable with IPTG fused with the differential expression of the sigma factor dependent promoters.