SUMBAWAGEN PROJECT OVERVIEW

Background

Before taking you to the main description of our project for iGEM 2014, let us give you an introduction of our campus. Biotechnology Faculty, Sumbawa University of Technology is a new university established on May 2013 in Sumbawa Regency of West Nusa Tenggara Province of Indonesia. Located in the island of Sumbawa, the university stands as the only one university that provide Biotechnology education for eastern part of Indonesia. As the impact of the geographical position, Sumbawa receives limited access to the economic and education sector compare with the other neighboring islands especially Java.

However, the island is famous for its honey production. Therefore, taking the opportunity of participating iGEM this year, we’d like to do a project in which we can apply synthetic biology which can contribute a positive impact to Sumbawa society not only in education sectors but also in other sectors like economic and politic. That’s how we came up with the idea of ECONEY.

ECONEY is engineered E. coli that capable to measure different level of glucose concentration in honey. BBa_J04450 has a lac promoter and mRFP gene, thus E. coli harboring this plasmid will give red color when the bacteria were grown with lactose or IPTG. Oppositely, the expression of mRFP will be decreased when glucose was present in medium through a mechanism called catabolite repression. We use this phenomenon to measure the concentration of glucose in honey by calibrating the color of E. coli medium using android-based mobile phone. Creation of novel circuit which consists of constitutive promoter followed by either Adenylate Cyclase or IIA(Glc) gene, which placed downward lac-mRFP circuit, may affect the sensitivity of catabolite repression. We expect an engineered E. coli, which shows red color expression in different range of glucose concentration. By changing mRFP gene with amilCP, a blue fluorescent protein, we may obtain E. coli expressing either red or blue color when different honey added to the medium due to different glucose concentration.

Even though Sumbawagen team consist of sophomore and in shortage condition to the facility and accessibility, that condition in fact push the team to think creatively in solving such limitation. For instance, inspite of using the refrigerated microsentrifuge for the transformation process we use mini centrifuge inside the refrigerator. We also created a homemade shaker for our cultivation project. Those conditions did not made our team lost the spirit to participate in the prestigious competition of iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machine) 2014. We encourage ourself to overcome the obstacle in front of us, like the quote from our Rector “Where there is a will, there is a way”.

Sponsors