Team:Valencia Biocampus/Standardization

Standardization

One should not assume that a functional module working fine in one cell type will work the same way in even a closely related cell type (Renshaw, 1993). Whereas traditional engineering practices typically rely on the standardization of parts, the uncertain and intricate nature of biology makes standardization in the synthetic biology field difficult. Beyond typical circuit design issues, synthetic biologists must also account for cell death, crosstalk, mutations, intracellular and extracellular conditions, noise and other biological phenomena. As the number of system components grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to coordinate component inputs and outputs to produce the overall desired behaviour (Purnick & Weiss, 2009). In the ST²OOL Project, we wanted to check how standard biobricks are. For this goal, we are using a set of strains of Escherichia coli transformed, in single transformation, with ten different Biobricks whose outputs will be measured by fluorometry, colorimetry or luminometry. The aim of this approach is simple and fits with the answer to the following question:

Will the Biobricks behave the same way independently of the host strain they have been transformed into? Will we obtain the same output from all of them? The answer to these questions… in two months!

References

Purnick, P. E. M. & Weiss, R. The second wave of synthetic biology: from modules to systems. Nature Reviews 10, 410-422 (2009).

Purnick, P. E. M. & Weiss, R. Renshaw, E. Modelling Biological Populations in Space and Time. Cambridge University Press (1993)10, 410-422 (2009).