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Team:Paris Bettencourt/Newsletter1
From 2014.igem.org
Paris Bettencourt 2014
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Newsletter n°1
from July 28th to August 10th 2014
Hi, all the iGEMers. I am happy to announce the first issue of our newsletter. This biweekly newsletter is cofounded by Paris Bettencourt iGEM team and Xiamen University iGEM team. Currently, we have 9 teams participating and are expecting more for the later issues. The newsletter has two major parts: project update and team member introduction. The teams should be writing about one of the parts every two weeks. We hope that through this activity, the teams will be able to keep better record of their own projects, gain feedback from their peers and get to know other young synthetic biologists. There will also be special issues with interviews of iGEM alumni and past advisors from college teams.
This first issue covers the general information of both the project and the introduction of each team. It also includes a question component, which includes the topics that each team wants to get feedback on from other teams. We highly encourage everyone to think about the questions and provide insights. Please send your thoughts to one member of the team and we will collect them a week from today.
Newsletter n°1
from July 28th to August 10th 2014
OUR TEAM
ETH Zürich is taking part to iGEM since it was opened to the European universities (for the second edition).
The team has known several successes in the Information Processing track of the competition. This year, we are seven highly motivated students from different backgrounds, aiming to rock the Information Processing track once again. The interaction between wet lab and dry lab is crucial for our team.
OUR PROJECT Make a Sierpinski triangle pattern appear in a grid Conjugate quorum sensing and logic gates in bacterial colonies Implement an XOR gate in an E. coli Characterize integrases (retrieve missing parameters) Study quorum sensing mechanism aiming to lower the leakiness Be able to predict accurately the system’s behavior.
Emergence of complex patterns in nature is a fascinating phenomenon, which is not fully understood yet. Some sea snail shells indeed present natural mosaics, made out of only two colors seemingly following a simple rule to form a pattern.
Our project Mosaicoli aims to implement a similar complex behavior. It challenges the high noise and the low robustness shown by biological systems. This cellular automaton consists of a regular grid of E. coli colonies. Either in an ON or OFF state, each colony interacts with its neighbours according to a fixed logic rule. Mosaicoli exploits quorum sensing, integrase logic gates and microfluidics to generate the Sierpinski triangle pattern. Communication between colonies is achieved by AHL molecules and subsequent updates in a cell state are determined by a discrete XOR integrase gate. The final state is read out via fluorescence, which collectively depicts a complex pattern. Mosaicoli deals with the leakiness of biological subunits to create a reliable complex entity, which can be considered as a first step towards the biological computer.
