Team:CPU-NanJing/Project

Revision as of 14:59, 30 July 2008 by LinXiaochen (Talk | contribs)

Project 1: Adding new chapters to the melody of life

As we know, all of the proteins in organism are composed by 20 kinds of natural amino acids. But some research shows that, some unnatural amino acids have better effects when they are instead of relevant natural ones and are introduced into the organism.
In our experiment, we insert different unnatural amino acids into the mutant GFP which shows no fluorescence because its Tyr66 has been mutated to TAG(nonsense codon). When some kind of unnatural amino acids are introduced and replace TAG66, the GFP shows no more green fluorescence but some other colors. For example, blue, purple, yellow, and so on.
We believe that the introduction of unnatural amino acids into biological system has a wide and bright prospect!

[[image:cpu-project1.jpg|300px]

Different biomacromolecules have different bioactivities due to their different physical and chemical characters.The molecular weight of the biomacromolecule plays an essential role. If we can obtain a biomacromolecule with homogeneous molecular weight with some methods, this would dramatically increase our ability to manipulate the biomacromolecule structure and function. Our aim is to design a device which can synthesize a biomacromolecule with homogeneous molecular weight in a fixed time controlled by the concentration of the lactose. During that time, different enzymes are expressed alternatively with different operators critically modulation. Then with the catalysis of the enzyme, a biomacromolecule which has a homogeneous molecular weight is synthesized. As a result, we can further study the relationship between the structure and the function of the biomacromolecule.

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