Team:Hong Kong HKUST/riboregulator/future work

Since the number of regulatory RNAs in part registry have been increasing over the years and they have not been well curated, our team wishes to solve this problem by creating a list of category tags and guidelines so that one can search these parts efficiently. Therefore, we will be continuing our work in testing and characterizing the regulatory RNAs for the ease of the synthetic biology community's use in the future.

Please visit our prototype of the catalog page and stay tuned with our updates.

The characterization result of riboregulators were out of our expectation - the taRNAs were unable to efficiently unlock their cognate crRNAs. We now realized that our genetic context used was different from how riboregulators were characterized initially. Expression of TAs were supposed to be driven from high copy plasmids while CRs were supposed to be driven from low copy vectors. Thus, we will progressively change the conditions used to characterize the constructs into a new genetic context. We hope that we can replicate others' results soon.

We observed a transfer function with an all-or-none response in the pBad/araC promoter on a low copy plasmid during measurement, which matched the experimental result from that of iGEM 2011 Cambridge team, who also used the same genetic context. We are now speculating that the discrepancy between results from iGEM 2011 Cambridge and Groningen was a result due to different copy number plasmids used in carrying the promoter. However, due to lack of sufficient time and manpower, we were unable to test that out in time. Our future work will involve resumption of this characterization, and hopefully, we can explain the discrepancy observed through a mathematical model.