Our project in a nutshell

The 2014 EPFL iGEM team has been working on showing that biologically engineered organisms can detect and process signals quickly and efficiently. With this in mind, our team brought forward a novel idea: combining protein complementation techniques with biosensors to achieve fast spatiotemporal analysis of cell responses to stimuli. To restate this in an easier way, we fused complementary reporter protein fragments to interacting proteins. The presence of a given stimulus leads to the interaction of the proteins of interest thus allowing the fused split complements to re-acquire their functional conformation and emit signal. We thereby are able to detect signal dynamics by relying on much faster post-transcriptional modifications rather than slow traditional reporter transcription.

As a proof-of-concept, we aimed to develop the first BioPad: a biological trackpad made of a microfluidic chip, touch-responsive organisms and a signal detector. To make our organisms touch-sensitive, we engineering two stress-related pathways in E. coli and S. cerevisiae. In E. coli, we engineered the Cpx Pathway - a two-component regulatory system responsive to envelope stress. In S. cerevisiae, we modified the HOG Pathway - a MAPKK pathway responsive to osmotic stress. As for the reporter proteins, we worked mainly with fluorescent proteins but also implemented a split luciferase complementation assay. To learn more about the various components of our project, check out our overview section. If you are a judge, you might also be interested in our result page, our data page and our judging form. And to see what other scientists think of our project, go to our human practice page.