Team:PennState

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.

Smart Fold Reporter Smart Fold Reporter is the subproject for the first strategy we are trying to express hPPARalpha in E. coli. This project uses altered growth conditions such that this nuclear hormone receptor protein can be successfully epressed and used to transcriptionally report for the presence of phthalates.

Nuclear Fusion Nuclear Fusion is our second approach to constructing a phthalate detection system in E. coli. In this project we use just the ligand binding domain of hPPARalpha fused to thymidylate synthase (TS). Binding of the phthalate ligand to this chimeric protein activates TS. When this construct is placed in a TS diffident strain, only E. coli in the presence of a hPPARalpha agonist will survive.

Quick Links Table of our Contributions to the Registry Interactive E. coLisa Schematic The University of Calgary Obrien Centre for the BHSC

Drew Endy On Synthetic Biology