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Team Nevada - Coming Soon

Since its inception in 2003 at MIT, the iGEM competition has grown to an international level bringing thousands of international students together. iGEM is dedicated to education through competition, to the advancement of synthetic biology, and the development of open community and collaboration.

Team Nevada's Goal:

Plant cellular regulation is as much affected by targeted protein degradation as it is by transcriptional regulation. This is in part due to the strict three-step ubiquitin pathway that involves three enzymes, the last of which, the E3 ubiquitin ligase, comes in over a thousand forms. The outcomes can be either reversible or permanent. The many possible complexes of E3 ligase and substrate also allow for a spectrum of concentration sensitivities, a characteristic that is vital to hormone signaling both in plants and humans. Auxin, a plant hormone, is involved in nearly every aspect of growth and development. Auxin receptors induce polyubiquitylation of a targeted protein once bound to auxin, which can be thought of as a protein-to-protein glue between the target protein and the E3 ligase. Jasmonates, although very similar to auxin, respond more to environmental stress. JA-Ile receptors mediate the degradation of JAZ proteins which are transcriptional repressors.
Nevada iGEM is utilizing these hormone based protein degradation pathways found in plants to create inducible protein degradation systems in yeast (and eventually mammalian cells). We are using the auxin and jasmonic acid pathways to test how fast we can manipulate degradation of a protein of interest. Our goals are to use the systems bioorthogonally to have zero cross-talk, or only beneficial cross-talk, and to utilize the mechanisms of the auxin pathway to have variable sensitivities and response time.