Team:Caltech/Project

The Caltech iGEM team plans to use the principles and methods of synthetic biology to create a model system that will resemble the hormone regulatory systems of the body. Examples of disorders of regulation can be seen in diabetes, hyperthyroidism, Cushing’s disease, etc. The project is to create an analogous model of one of these regulatory systems in E. coli, showing one plausible framework to serve as a scaffold for further research. The model system will follow the design in the picture below. The gene circuit has been designed to produce a signaling peptide in response to some factor, and then have another cell respond to the produced signaling peptide to form a regulatory network. The pathway used to activate the regulation will ideally not interfere with any of the intercellular genetic circuitry already present in E. coli. The synthetic pathway will be assembled from systems that are present in other bacteria and will hopefully be dissimilar enough to not interact with any already present E. coli circuitry. We will be building off of a previous iGEM team’s project of bacterial quorum sensing and regulation in E. coli.