Team:Penn/Overview

Synthetic biologists engineer organisms for impactful applications ranging from bacterial biosensors for disease diagnostics to microbial strains capable of cleaning up radiation. Largely, these projects utilize the reliable “powerhouse” host cell of synthetic biology: E.Coli. This strain serves as a valuable chassis for most projects as it is well-characterized and easy to transform with engineered DNA parts. If researchers could easily engineer rarer strains of bacteria and take advantage of their biological diversity, the field would open up to new applications that leverage the unique attributes of these unconventional chassis.

We characterized a fascinating and underused organism: Magnetospirillum magneticum (AMB-1), a bacterium that aligns with magnetic fields. AMB-1 had previously been incorporated in very few publications. By developing, testing, and optimizing protocols for its growth and transformation, and then making them easily accessible in a convenient Strain Spec Sheet, we hope to establish AMB-1 as an easily engineered organism. We also tested and troubleshot the few genetic parts used in AMB-1 engineering, and then designed a new, BioBrick-compatible vector with an AMB-1 specific origin of replication, promoter, and multiple-cloning site. We are currently characterizing this vector, pMAGMA3.

In the future, AMB-1 has high potential for use in novel synthetic biology applications because of its capacity to align with magnetic fields. We are especially interested in using AMB-1 for bioremediation applications, such as cleaning pollutants from water. Many engineered microbes can absorb pollutants, but if AMB-1 were used instead of E.Coli, it could be subsequently removed from the water with a magnet – effectively removing both the pollutant and the engineered microbe. To help prove this concept is feasible, we ran experiments to test that AMB-1 can survive in water polluted with the heavy metal, cadmium.