Difference between revisions of "Team:Tuebingen/Safety"

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<h2> Safety in iGEM Team Tuebingen</h2>
 
<h2> Safety in iGEM Team Tuebingen</h2>
  
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<h4> A Biosensor Memory Module: Cre Sensor</h4>
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<p>Please visit <a href="https://2015.igem.org/Safety">the main Safety page</a> to find this year's safety requirements & deadlines, and to learn about safe & responsible research in iGEM.</p>
  
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<p>Analysis and imaging methods are an indispensable element of every scientific study - in a wider sense the results are only as good as their measurement methods.<br/>
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<p>On this page of your wiki, you should write about how you are addressing any safety issues in your project. The wiki is a place where you can <strong>go beyond the questions on the safety forms</strong>, and write about whatever safety topics are most interesting in your project. (You do not need to copy your safety forms onto this wiki page.)</p>
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Photostimulation is one of the most important non-invasive analysis methods allowing researchers to examine the relationship between metabolic processes, e.g. through activating a molecule via light treatment. We want to create a module which makes it possible to take a snapshot of the activity of a sensor at any time.
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Our designed system should be capable of capturing such a ‘snapshot’ of the activity of a sensor. Therefore our aim is to create a Cre recombinase whose activity can be reversibly controlled by light. By activating this construct only for a short period of time, we can use a Cre to switch on expression of Luciferase in only a limited amount of the sensor cells. Through coupling the Cre expression to the sensor we can thereby permanently write the sensor state of a given time point into the DNA of a system. </p>
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Revision as of 12:13, 19 August 2015

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Safety in iGEM Team Tuebingen

Please visit the main Safety page to find this year's safety requirements & deadlines, and to learn about safe & responsible research in iGEM.

On this page of your wiki, you should write about how you are addressing any safety issues in your project. The wiki is a place where you can go beyond the questions on the safety forms, and write about whatever safety topics are most interesting in your project. (You do not need to copy your safety forms onto this wiki page.)

To achieve the construction of a reversibly activatable Cre recombinase we want to apply the caging mechanism described by Zhou et al [1]. This caging is performed by fusing a copy of a variant of the fluorescent protein Dronpa to both the C- and N-terminus of the Cre recombinase. Since this Dronpa variant is able to form monomers or dimers depending on illumination with light of different wavelengths, we hope that the dimerized form inhibits the activity of the Cre recombinase.

Because our system only needs the expression of the caged Cre construct to be dependent on a sensor, it can be combined with almost all Biosensors that include a means of transcriptional control. This gives the system a wide variety of possible applications, especially in the context of the work of other iGEM teams.

[1] Zhou, XX; Chung, HK; Lam, AJ & Lin, MZ. (2012). Optical control of protein activity by fluorescent protein domains. Science, 338(6108), 810-814.