Brixells: Achieving Spatial Organisation of Cells
Our aim is to develop a technique which allows precision control over the positioning of cells in space.
Our goal can be broken down into two main steps:
- 1. Developing a method that enables cells to bind to a specific area.
- 2. Creating a target to which the cells can attach.
By modifying cells to express (and display) zinc finger proteins on their surface, we can engineer cells that have the ability to recognise and bind to specific sequences of double stranded DNA. The arrangement of these DNA strands can then allow the cells to be positioned in the desired area.
What we did:
Zinc finger proteins are intracellular molecules that recognise (and bind) unique strands of double stranded DNA. We expressed these zinc fingers on the surface of our cell by attaching them to transmembrane proteins.
Using 4 different zinc fingers and anchor proteins, we planned to optimise the system by finding the best combinations of zinc fingers to anchor proteins.
By using immunofluorescence microscopy we were able to test the 2 main steps to achieving our goal. We looked at whether our anchor proteins were being expressed, as well as the binding between our zinc fingers and their unique binding domains.