Team:Warwick
Our Project
Our team's aim is to create a tool box allowing the selective allocation of specific cell types to an engineered DNA scaffold, using zinc finger binding proteins on an E. coli model. Our research would allow for the self assembly of complex multi-type cell structures. The project will advance in progressive bands of complexity: designing and cloning the zinc finger coated E. coli cells, constructing DNA structure to allow for the cells to bind, further development of the zinc finger binding proteins allowing for multiple cell types to coexist on the DNA structure, and finally designing complex 3-D structures that the cells will be able to self assemble into. This has possible applications throughout medicine. Our research would contribute potentially to 3-D printing organic tissues, allowing for customised living tissues to be engineered.
At Warwick iGEM we are passionate about the art of science, the way we can meld biology with design to make a product greater than the sum of its parts. We were inspired by this paper on using zinc fingers to barcode cells with fluorescently tagged double stranded DNA oligos; and considered whether it was possible to use these same zinc finger proteins in a way that has never been done before. By modifying our cells to express zinc finger binding domains on the outside of the cell wall could we, in the same manner that the DNA is bound to the cells in the paper, instead bind the cells to fixed structured DNA on a 2D plane? And then, using existing DNA origami research, could we expand this into creating self assembling 3D cell structures? It’s an improbable feat with an impossible goal, yet we shall strive all the more to reach it.
Fluorescent microscopy has long been the go to method for validating protein expression, and we are carrying on this long tradition by tying the expression of cell surface zinc fingers with the expression of fluorescent proteins inside the cell. By using multiple different zinc fingers with unique specific binding sites we allow different cell types to bond simultaneously to our DNA structure. The potential applications of this are limitless, imagine layers of different types of synthetic tissues; the construction of lab made skin and other organs. Imagine also a world where advanced materials with enhanced properties made cheaply by multiple different cells working together is possible. As a proof of concept, that it is possible to bind different cell types to the same structure we are engineering E. coli to express different coloured fluorescent proteins along with their unique zinc finger proteins, showing visually how many different coloured cells can coexist in a controlled environment. Coincidentally, this allows us also to create art by arranging groups of coloured cells into images, allowing for some of the first fully coloured images made using only living cells.