Team:Austin UTexas

UT Austin iGEM 2015 Home

BREAKING IS BAD


The 2015 UT Austin iGEM Team's major project is primarily concerned with the stability of genetically modified devices in bacteria. Devices run the risk of breaking, or mutating, if they prove to be too much metabolic stress to an organism. We endeavored to identify and better characterize the types of sequences that are prone to breaking, and used fluorescent-protein coding strains of E. coli to observe breaking speed.

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CAFFEINATED COLI


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We constructed plasmids that are capable of degrading different methylxanthines and allowing us to accurately measure their concentrations. The 2012 UT Austin iGEM team, with the help of Dr. Erik Quandt, developed the ΔguaB pDCAF3 strain that could measure the concentration of caffeine by degrading it into a viable replacement for guanine. The 2015 team modified the pDCAF3 strain into seven plasmids that could degrade different methylxanthines with fairly high specificity.
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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.