Team:TU-Delft/overview

Do you smell bananas?

Yeast, we choose you!

The TU Delft iGEM team is working on yeast, a simple eukaryote. One of our goals is to enable this organism to detect, or smell, the scent associated with tuberculosis or bananas. For this project, we will use the mating pathway and alter it a little. Yeast genders are called 'a' and 'α'. Both genders extract pheromones, also called 'a'- and 'α'-pheromones. The 'a'-Yeasts are able to detect the 'α'-pheromones, and so the other way around. Upon detection, the yeast cells will show a mating response, called a shmoo.

The image below links to the page explaining more about yeast and why we decided to use it!

I'd appreciate your input!

Once the pheromone-receptors detects pheromones of another gender, a larger gene cascade starts to assemble. The moment that the pheromone binds to the receptor, the G-alpha subunit comes to action. This protein, directed by the GPA-gene starts a signal leading to growth arrest and the mating response, a shmoo. To make the smelling device, our yeast cells need a niacin-(the scent associated with tuberculosis) receptor. This receptor is put in the same place as the pheromone receptor and will use the same pathway. This is easily done by using the same promoter in front of the gene coding for the receptor.

To view the plasmids we have made and the accompanying experiments you can click the image below.

At least it puts out

When the cell detects a smell, niacin in this case, we do not want the cell growth to stop, so we deleted the FAR1-gene, which causes growth arrest. Upon detecting this niacin molecule, we would like to see more than a mating response, the shmoo. For this reason, we added a GFP-output which is promoted by the same promoter as the mating response, the FUS1.

Click the image to learn more about our GFP-output!