Difference between revisions of "Team:Austin UTexas"

Project Description

Our iGEM team, under the supervision of the Barrick lab at the University of Texas at Austin, developed five individual projects inspired by members’ interests and concerns in synthetic biology, with a foundation of technical skills and lab experience built during a spring semester course. The projects our team members have devised focus on a multitude of topics, from attempts at improving the stability and efficiency of existing genetic machines, to identifying bacterial factories that can have ecological function. Our projects focused on improving and expanding on the existing microbial factories in E. coli include an attempt to optimize the ΔguaB pDCAF strain of E. coli (Quandt et al., 2013) to discount nutrients provided by non-caffeine methylxanthines, and a project assessing the evolutionary stability of yellow fluorescent protein, enhanced yellow fluorescent protein, and super-folder yellow fluorescent protein. Our projects that have a more ecological significance focus on drought, and the introduction/amplification of genes that produce trehalose, auxins, and ACC deaminase; transformation of the bee gut bacteria Snodgrassella and Gilliamella with the NHase gene to degrade the neonicotinoid thiacloprid; and the use of selective enrichment to isolate a strain/strains of bacteria that can degrade the neonicotinoid thiamethoxam. An additional project with more direct human impact concerns itself with creating a food-safe bacterial pH sensor to detect when milk has spoiled.

References

Quandt, Erik M., et al. "Decaffeination and measurement of caffeine content by addicted Escherichia coli with a refactored N-demethylation operon from Pseudomonas putida CBB5." ACS synthetic biology 2.6 (2013): 301-307.

Zhang, Hui-Juan, et al. "Biotransformation of the neonicotinoid insecticide thiacloprid by the bacterium Variovorax boronicumulans strain J1 and mediation of the major metabolic pathway by nitrile hydratase."Journal of agricultural and food chemistry 60.1 (2011): 153-159.

Liu, Juan, et al. "An improved method for extracting bacteria from soil for high molecular weight DNA recovery and BAC library construction." The Journal of Microbiology 48.6 (2010): 728-733.