Difference between revisions of "Team:KU Leuven"

Patterns are fascinating, from the veins of a leaf to the stripes of a zebra. They are everywhere in nature, but why and how they are formed is not entirely understood. The way cells of multicellular organisms interact to generate a specific pattern has triggered our curiosity. We, the KU Leuven 2015 iGEM team, engaged in a project on the regulatory mechanisms of motif formation. Our mission is to engineer bacteria able to communicate and influence each other’s behaviour resulting in the assembly of predictable visible patterns.

We designed a system in which two different E. coli cell types A and B, when mixed on an agar plate, organize themselves in a complex pattern. The regulatory circuit controls and steers two bacterial properties: cell-cell interaction and motility. This circuit makes bacterial cells of type A to produce an adherent protein and at the same time repel B-type cells. We expect the development of a pattern, where A-cells are clumping together and B-cells form circles around A-cells. This synthetic bacterial system will provide us with a platform to study the fundamentals of pattern formation. Such synthetic circuits will be useful, e.g., for engineering complex tissues consisting of different cell types.

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