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Team:Cambridge-JIC
From 2014.igem.org
mösbi - a plant biosensor for everyone
mӧsbi stands for marchantia open-source biosensor. mӧsbi encapsulates the team's vision of creating a user-friendly, open-source biosensor using the liverwort Marchantia polymorpha. With its sturdy genetic framework and modularity, mӧsbi represents a new step in popularising synthetic biology and making it accessible to a large audience - it allows us to bring synthetic biology into your living room! Click here to find out more.
Marchantia polymorpha as a new chassis
Marchantia polymorpha is our novel, eukaryotic multicellular chassis. Being a liverwort, it is one of the most primitive land plants around. Its small size and relative genetic simplicity make it easy to work with and an exciting new model organism in synthetic biology. Content to grow on agar plates, marchantia can be bioengineered in a standard lab with minimal extra equipment. Click here to find out more about the plant and our work to develop the chassis; and here to learn how to get started using marchantia in your own iGEM project.
Results
We successfully transformed hundreds of individual plants, resulting in the first expression of chromoproteins in marchantia, and probably the first expression of chromoproteins in any plant. We successfully built an Arduino-controlled growth chamber, characterised an enzyme new to iGEM and amended the community's knowledge of an existing registry entry. A known marchantia promoter was also added to the registry, along with 27 candidate promoters from the Marchantia genome. They are part of a Marchantia starter kit part collection that also includes terminators, direction sequences, etc. Finally, we submitted an RFC with collaboration of two other iGEM teams, establishing a unified Type IIS based grammar for Plant synthetic biologist: PlantSyntax. Click here for more result details, and here for our executive summary.
Our team
We are 9 Cambridge science undergraduates from various backgrounds and with all kinds of fascinating and curious interests. Click here to learn more about the team.
