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Team:PennState/Project
From 2008.igem.org
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Tell us more about your project. Give us background. Use this is the abstract of your project. Be descriptive but concise (1-2 paragraphs) |  Your team picture |
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Contents |
Overall project
Our project aims to construct a bio sensor which will ultimately serve as a pre screening tool to detect the presence of phthalates in water sample. Recently phthalates have been shown to cause negative health effect in humans; some phthalates are even though to be carcinogenic. Analytical detection methods for these compounds are compound specific as well as very costly. Having a simple, and cheep tool to screen for phthalates as a general class of compounds would eliminate some of the cost and time involved in current detection methods.
We use the natural human nuclear hormone receptor protein that recognizes phthalates as an agonist (hPPARα), and expressing it heterologously in Escherichia Coli. Because of the complexity of this mammalian protein, expressing it in a prokaryote is difficult. We have two different strategies to express hPPARα and using it to detect phthalates in E. Coli.
