Team:UMBC-Maryland/Results

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Project Results

We genetically engineered several strains of E. coli in an effort to increase copper resistance and collection. We named each strain after our school's mascot, the Chesapeake Bay Retriever. Retriever 1 (Ret1) has been given the yeast metallothionein gene CUP1. Retriever 2 (Ret2) has been given the same CUP1 gene codon optimized for E. coli. Retriever 3 (Ret3) has been given the CUP1 gene codon optimized, fused with bacteriophage lambda receptor (LamB). Each strain was tested for cell density and extracellular copper concentration at different initial copper sulfate concentrations for 7-10 hours.

Ret1 and Ret3 showed no significant cell growth, possibly due to the toxicity of the protein, or due to the stress placed on the cell from protein synthesis. The Ret1 strain showed no significant difference from control in either copper uptake or cell viability in copper. The Ret2 strain showed increased cell viability in high copper concentrations, but did not show any significant increase in copper uptake ability. The Ret3 strain showed very low growth most likely due to excessive protein load. However, it showed a marked increase in copper uptake as compared to the control strain.

In the future, we wish to do data analysis and further test the ability for a LamB-Metallothionein fusion to improve the cell's copper absorbance ability.