Team:TU Delft-Leiden/Modeling/Curli
From 2014.igem.org
Curli Module
The goal of our project for the conductive curli module is to produce a biosensor that consists of E. coli that are able to build a conductive biofilm, induced by any promoter see the gadget section of our wiki and the extracellular electron transport (EET) module. The biofilm consists of curli containing His-tags that can connect to gold nanoparticles, see the conductive curli module. When the curli density is sufficiently high, a dense network of connected curli fibrils is present around the cells. Further increasing the amount of curli results in a conductive pathway connecting the cells, thereby forming conductive clusters. Increasing the amount of curli even further, sufficiently curli fibrils are present to have a cluster that connects the two electrodes and thus have a conducting system.
The goal of the modeling of the curli module is to prove that our biosensor system works as expected and to capture the dynamics of our system. So, we want to answer the question: "Does a conductive path between the two electrodes arise at a certain point in time and at which time does this happen?" However, we not only want to answer the question if our system works as expected qualitatively, but we also want to make quantitative predictions about the resistance between the two electrodes of our system in time.