On a day in paradise, Nicholas would be found eating a delicious meal, reading a great book, and playing squash. A sophomore from Seattle, Washington has a real passion for computation, especially when applied to biology. In addition, he has become known as the funniest member of the team. One of his greatest quotes, “Cold room or die”, has become a classic Harvard BioDesign joke, succinctly describing the struggle that is the cold room. One of the parts of the project that he is most excited about is the potential for biological cryptography.
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Our system encodes sensing information into the amyloid protein curli within bacterial biofilms. Unlike common reporter proteins, curli fibers are highly resistant to degradation and can survive extreme pH and temperature changes extracellularly. Applying chromoproteins engineered to bind specifically to corresponding curli units, information is easily displayed.
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Natural cellular mechanisms are co-opted by synthetic biologists for use in biological sensors. Typical reporters such as GFP are only detectable inside living cells and used to gather information in the laboratory environment.
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Our system encodes sensing information into the amyloid protein curli within bacterial biofilms. Unlike common reporter proteins, curli fibers are highly resistant to degradation and can survive extreme pH and temperature changes extracellularly. Applying chromoproteins engineered to bind specifically to corresponding curli units, information is easily displayed.
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