Team:SCUT/HP/Magazine/iGEM Thinking

The Amazing Fluoresce Ice Cream

British boutique ice cream maker Lick Me I'm Delicious (yes, that is the company's real name) recently released a glow-in-the-dark ice cream that uses a luminescent protein from glowing jellyfish. The idea? Lick the ice cream and calcium-activated proteins react by glowing, thanks to differences in your mouth's warmer pH level and the ice cream's more neutral pH.

Be forewarned: a scoop will set you back about $220 in sweet change. Turns out jellyfish protein isn't exactly cheap. But no worries: Charlie Harry Francis, the food scientist who invented the treat, assures foodies that it's safe for consumption.

The glowing frozen dessert made us wonder about other instances of luminescence out there. Green fluorescent proteins used in studies aren't just the stuff of mad scientist dreams: it earned the inventor glowing praise and a Nobel Prize in 2008.

Now fluorescent proteins have been already widely used in many scientific research fields, especially in biology. In iGEM, fluorescent proteins are usually used as reporters. What are reporters? The answer is that in synthetic biology, they are often used as a mechanism to display information. For example, fluorescent proteins cause a cell to fluoresce when excited with light of a particular wavelength. What’s more, the iGEM team of Tokyo Tech once used fluorescent proteins to create a pen whose ink is the different genetically engineered bacteria. The bacteria can express different fluorescent proteins so that people can use it to draw many colorful paintings.

Reporters are frequently used to quantify the strength or activity of upstream gene expression parts. Reporters, when fused in frame to other protein coding sequences, can also be used to identify where a protein is located in a cell or organism, which is fully reflected in this year’s project of Team SCUT. Our Team will use the cherry，yellow，blue，green and cyan fluorescent proteins to indicate whether our target proteins reach the right positions of the cell.