Team:SCU-China/Background

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Background

From the ancient to the present, human society has gone through a series of changes, the first and second industrial revolution for example. As a result the human society becomes more and more differentiated during these revolutions or changes. Obviously, the well-differentiated, highly ordered society is more productive than that without specific division of labor. Consequently, we have enough reasons to believe that if we could make the microorganisms do one particular job in cell communication (including the sensing, transmitting, and effecting processes) we could make things better. However, inasmuch as almost all the teams of IGEM that used cell communication just messed all the 3 processes in one cell, the cell will be faced with terrible loads so that they cannot construct a more complicated gene pathway and cell communication system. In this condition, what we want to do is to separate different cells into 3 communities who is in charge of sensing, transmitting, and effecting respectively and combining them to make a group with some intelligence.

In order to construct these 3 communities, the key is to solve the problems of communication between different communities. So we use some promoters and proteins of AHL family (Lux, Las, Rhl, Cin signal system). To this end, we have set up the fundament of our project and we want to make it more interesting. Accordingly, we design our system which could satisfy our demanding that when our sensor accepts 2 different changes, our effector could give a different outcome. These different outcome are not limited by the change of quantity of our protein but also the change of kind of our protein. This means, our system could express correct protein according to the environment demanding. To fulfill this task, we have to use at least 5 cell signal communication system. Unfortunately, we just found 4 different cell signal communication systems in the pool of IGEM. So we managed to find a totally new cell signal communication system—the PPy induced-Lux like system.

Sichuan university