Team:UIUC Illinois/Results

Results

"I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them."

Karl Friedrich Gauss

Feeding Assay

Experimental analysis began with verifying biobrick BBa_K734000. To verify growth from solely caffeine or theobromine, the organisms were sent to us from UT Austin with the guaB gene knocked out. Guanine comes from xanthine, which is a necessary factor for microbial growth. Without the ability to produce guanine, xanthine degradation is imperative for guanine biosynthesis therefore addicting the microorganisms to caffeine. We set out experimentally to show that theobromine degradation could also be used for xanthine degradation using the same N-Demethylation pathway. Our results are as follow:

Figure 1. All organisms were grown on M9 Media with specified amounts of Theobromine & Caffeine. Refer to lab notebook.
By verifiying that our ΔguaB cells could only grow in media with caffeine or theobromine present, we verified that part BBa_K734000 was functional.