Team:The Tech Museum/Project

Overview:

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.