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Team:IIT Madras
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Who are we?
IIT Madras, located in the Southern Indian city of [http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=12.992849,80.236931&spn=0.152212,0.296974&t=h&z=12 Chennai], is being represented by a team comprising 6 undergraduates working at IIT Madras and 2 faculty members - Dr. Guhan Jayaraman from the Department of Biotechnology at IIT Madras and Dr. Mukund Thattai from National Center for Biological Sciences located in Bangalore. After an extensive brainstorming process, we decided to be part of the synthetic biology community by participating in iGEM for the first time this year.
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 controlled 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 housekeeping sigma 70 to include in our library. Our design attempts to engineer the regulation achievable in lac based promoters fused with the differential expression of the sigma factor dependent promoters.
