Team:CPU-NanJing/Project

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Project 1: Adding new notes to the song of life

The word protein comes from the Greek word πρώτα ("prota"), meaning "of primary importance." They are the chief actors within the cell, said to be carrying out the duties specified by the information encoded in genes. If we regard life as a beautiful song, proteins, of course, are the most important strains of this song.
Proteins in nature are usually composed of 20 “standard” amino acids. They are basic notes in life songs. However, as for people who are interested in synthetic biology, 20 “standard” amino acids are not enough. Could we insert some unnatural notes to write a new song apart from natural “bio-parts”?
In our project, we designed some new parts by which we could insert different unnatural amino acids into a certain site in target protein. Of course these unnatural amino acids would bring some new characteristics of the target protein.

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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