Team:Virginia

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UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Welcome to the Virginia Genetically Engineered Machine Team's official iGEM wiki! The VGEM team is in its second year of competition and is looking forward to participating in the 2008 iGEM Jamboree.

Synthetic biological systems are useful both to empirically study fundamental biological behavior and to solve applied biological problems. One of the main challenges in constructing synthetic biological systems is the inability to precisely regulate gene expression using artificial means. It is likely that only a combination of powerful strategies will result in tightly-regulated control of any given set of related transcriptional, translational and posttranslational events, which is crucial to advancing the field of synthetic biology. Therefore, the 2008 VGEM Team is developing a new tool for biological engineering, transcriptional terminators intentionally redesigned to be functionally inefficient. A well-characterized library of standardized transcriptional terminators of various efficiencies should allow finely-tuned transcriptional attenuation by controlling termination efficiency and represents yet another step toward global biological control. This work represents a complimentary approach to other gene expression control methods that focus on initiation of transcription. The desired result is precise, quantitative control of transcript levels, which is often necessary to balance flux through a synthetic metabolic pathway. To demonstrate its potential for real-world application, the team is planning to employ this approach to control the expression of a heterologous pathway in E. coli for the synthesis of polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB), a biodegradable polyester plastic derived from renewable biomass, not from petroleum sources.