Team:Austin UTexas
Welcome to iGEM 2015!
TEST TEST TEST Your team has been approved and you are ready to start the iGEM season!
Test: University of Texas at Austin homeProject 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. ReferencesQuandt, 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.
Editing your wiki
On this page you can document your project, introduce your team members, document your progress and share your iGEM experience with the rest of the world!
See tips on how to edit your wiki on the Template Documentation page.
Templates
This year we have created templates for teams to use freely. More information on how to use and edit the templates can be found on the Template Documentation page.
Uploading pictures and files
You can upload your pictures and files to the iGEM 2015 server. Remember to keep all your pictures and files within your team's namespace or at least include your team's name in the file name.
When you upload, set the "Destination Filename" to Team:YourOfficialTeamName/NameOfFile.jpg. (If you don't do this, someone else might upload a different file with the same "Destination Filename", and your file would be erased!)