Team:The Tech Museum/Project

Overview:

Content

We created a pool of plasmids designed to produce wide hue diversity in bacteria. Variation in promoter strength randomizes the relative expression levels of red, yellow, and cyan color reporters in each plasmid. In this way, we can create bacterial ‘pixels.’ Theoretically, the hue of each resulting colony should represent a particular combination of reporter protein concentrations, similar to how an RGB LED operates.

Museum visitors are guided through the transformation of e.coli with this plasmid pool to generate plates with a rainbow of bacteria colonies. Next, they take those petri dishes to an interactive scanning station. We developed software that uses digital imaging and computer vision to analyze the color, intensity, and rarity of the bacteria colonies on the visitor’s plate. A dynamic visualization of our team’s aggregate color data is then updated in real time with each participant's individual contribution to our iGEM team.

Which promoter-RBS-color combinations will fail? Which colony hues will we not ever see? Which will dominate? Our software and the participation of museum visitors is designed to find that out.

You can use these subtopics to further explain your project

1. Overall project summary
2. Project Details
3. Materials and Methods
4. The Experiments
5. Results
6. Data analysis
7. Conclusions

It's important for teams to describe all the creativity that goes into an iGEM project, along with all the great ideas your team will come up with over the course of your work.

It's also important to clearly describe your achievements so that judges will know what you tried to do and where you succeeded. Please write your project page such that what you achieved is easy to distinguish from what you attempted.