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Our project is in the track of Foundation Advancement; which is focused on providing technologies or parts that can benefit the sphere of synthetic biology or specifically the iGEM community and future competitors. With this in mind, our project's aim to is provide a technique that allows cells to have the ability to be localised to designated areas through genetic modification. Whilst in our project we are using E.coli as our model organism, the parts we create will be open to be trialled in other organisms. Researchers in microbiology and other fields can benefit from this work with the goal of being able to bring together cells of different types into contact. We are wanting to look more in depth into specific situations where this project can play an impact and be used. We are also looking to continually mould and adapt our work so any critique or questions that this work prompts we are very willing to hear about too.
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Zinc finger proteins are intracellular molecules which recognise and bind unique dsDNA sequences. We have chosen a set of zinc fingers; 16 synthetic and already characterised from previous work, alongside several others such as Zif268. The mechanism of transporting the zinc finger to the outer membrane is through constructing a fusion protein with an anchor protein, which will be transported and embedded within the membrane. For certainty of getting a zinc finger to the membrane we have chosen 4 candidate anchor proteins to test, based on well documented research and whether some of which had been used with success by previous iGEM teams. From the collection of candidate anchor proteins and zinc fingers we aim to optimise this system, and have a collection of zinc fingers which allow multiple cells to be brought into contact.
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A working model of how the DNA shape will be produced is described in Fig.4. We are currently collaborating with the Oxford iGEM team to produce this DNA structure.
