“The sea is everything. […] The sea is the vast reservoir of Nature. The globe began with sea, so to
speak”, Nemo said while the “Nautilus” was cruising with a school of hammerhead sharks deep
beneath the waves.
And the captain was right. Deep in the ocean billions of years ago the miracle of nature took place as
a pool of small molecules evolved to self-replicating lifeforms. The flagship role in this development
was probably taken by the most versatile class of molecules in the history of life: RNA.
Seemingly random nucleotides happened to be in the right order to form the first biocatalysts that
made life on the blue planet possible. Today we know those miracles of nature as ribozymes. Inspired
by this, humanity took evolution into their own hands to create aptamers – nucleic acids capable of
encaging molecules. This allows for the detection of virtually anything. Still this process has been
tedious and time consuming much like fishing with a rod in an ocean. We want to revolutionize this
former evolutionary process and want to make it swift like a shark tracking down its prey.
Yet to really bring out the strengths of these simple yet powerful molecules just comprised of A, U, C
and G we want to combine aptamers and ribozymes to create a toolset for the synthetic biologist to
create allosteric ribozymes able to sense a variety of molecules. Therefore, we hope to introduce the
true origins of life and the capabilities of functional RNA to iGEM.
Join us as we sail forth into new
waters of synthetic biology.
Team:Heidelberg
