Team:Duke

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                    <h1> Designing the modern optogenetic toolkit: <span class="undercolored">from principle to practice</span></h1>
 
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                    <p><em style="font-size: 13pt;"> Characterization of rapidly perturbable optogentic logic through a proof-of-concept in yeast cell cycle control</em></p>
 
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                        <h2><span class="colored"><strong>///</strong></span> The Team and Our Pursuit</h2>
 
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                            <p style="margin-bottom:10px;"><em>Thorough characterization of key genes and controlling cellular oscillation precisely.</em></p>
 
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                            <h5>Hard Work and Dedication</h5>
 
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                            <p>Our team is fully aware of it's disadvantages, being smaller than the rest, and holding less funding than the competition. However, these notions motivate each individual on the team rather than discourage us. We know that we will get out of this project, exactly what we put into it. Understanding this notion is why it is not unusual to find our team working 12 hour shifts daily. We are inspired and determined to contribute to the scientific          community in a substantial way, utilizing our resources, and setting new standards.</p>
 
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                            <h5>Optogenetics, the <span class="undercolored">HOT TOPIC</span></h5>
 
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                            <p>Optogenetics is the combination of genetic and optical methods to control specific events in targeted cell. In 2010, optogenetics was chosen as the Method of the Year across all fields of science and engineering by the interdisciplinary research journal Nature Methods. At the same time, optogenetics was highlighted in the article on "Breakthroughs of the Decade" in the scientific research journal Science Breakthrough of the Decade.</p>
 
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                    <h2><span class="colored"><strong>///</strong></span> Check out our <span class="undercolored"><a href="#">Lab Journal and Notes</a></span></h2>
 
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                                            <h4>Preparative Digestion and Electrophoresis</h4>
 
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                                            <span><i class="icon-calendar icon-white"></i> JOURNAL ENTRY by Morgan J. Howell on June 22, 2012</span>
 
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                                        <p>Today I attempted to ligate the insert mKate with the vector YFP. I intially digested mKate and YFP using the digestive enzymes BAMHI-HF and ASC-I, with Buffer #4. After the one and a half hour digestion, I prepared a deep well gel and inserted the digested plasmids tagged with orange dye. After the run, I took the gel into a dark room, and using a black light table and sterile razor blade ... <br><br><a class="btn btn-small" href="notes.html">Read More</a></p>
 
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                                            <h4>Anoter blog post</h4>
 
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                                            <span><i class="icon-calendar icon-white"></i> Fantasy by Lewis Carroll on Aug 24, 2011</span>
 
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                                        <p>It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using 'Content here, content here'.<br><br><a class="btn btn-small" href="#">Read More</a></p>
 
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                                            <h4>Anoter blog post</h4>
 
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                                            <span><i class="icon-calendar icon-white"></i> Fantasy by Lewis Carroll on Aug 24, 2011</span>
 
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                                            <h4>Anoter blog post</h4>
 
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                                            <span><i class="icon-calendar icon-white"></i> Fantasy by Lewis Carroll on Aug 24, 2011</span>
 
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                    <h5><span class="colored">///</span> Duke iGEM 2012</h5>
 
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                    <p>Consisting of a group of highly ambitous and motivated students, Duke iGEM strives to exceed the impressive, continually striving to contribute to the modern world of synthetic biology.</p>
 
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                    <h5><span class="colored">///</span> Contact info</h5>
 
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                    <span><strong class="colored"> Address:</strong> 1219 Broad Street, Durham NC</span>
 
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                    <span><strong class="colored">Phone:</strong> (704) 985-5705 </span>
 
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    <span><strong class="colored">Phone:</strong> (919) 923-8276 </span>
 
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                    <h5><span class="colored">///</span> Interested?</h5>
 
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===Executive Summary===
 +
One of the most promising fields of medical genetic research is gene therapy, which seeks to deliver genes to patients to treat medical conditions. Identifying genes that can be used as therapeutics is critical for the progression of gene therapy to clinical trials. However, current methods for identifying gene therapeutic targets are slow and expensive: the cost of analyzing a gene is $2146.75 and can take three weeks before analysis. The goal of our work was to develop a toolkit for researchers to use for more rapid and cost-efficient identification of gene therapeutic targets. In yeast, a model of human genes, we used an emerging topic known as optogenetics to create a light switch for gene activation: we can activate specific genes in our samples with the addition of blue light. After verifying the functionality of our system, we compiled our utilities into a physical toolkit, which contains custom yeast strains, standardized DNA parts, a computational network model, and a custom software package for rapid analysis of data. When we evaluated the performance of our toolkit, we found that we reduced waiting time during experimentation from 36 hours to 22.0 seconds (a 5900-fold speed increase), and our software reduced data analysis time from 7.5 hours to 3.45 seconds (a 7800-fold speed increase). We reduced the cost of experimental materials by 85.2% while broadening the spectrum of discovery in gene therapy. Our comprehensive toolkit streamlines identification of genetic therapeutic targets, and will speed progress toward personalized therapy of a variety of diseases.

Latest revision as of 21:13, 15 October 2012

Executive Summary

One of the most promising fields of medical genetic research is gene therapy, which seeks to deliver genes to patients to treat medical conditions. Identifying genes that can be used as therapeutics is critical for the progression of gene therapy to clinical trials. However, current methods for identifying gene therapeutic targets are slow and expensive: the cost of analyzing a gene is $2146.75 and can take three weeks before analysis. The goal of our work was to develop a toolkit for researchers to use for more rapid and cost-efficient identification of gene therapeutic targets. In yeast, a model of human genes, we used an emerging topic known as optogenetics to create a light switch for gene activation: we can activate specific genes in our samples with the addition of blue light. After verifying the functionality of our system, we compiled our utilities into a physical toolkit, which contains custom yeast strains, standardized DNA parts, a computational network model, and a custom software package for rapid analysis of data. When we evaluated the performance of our toolkit, we found that we reduced waiting time during experimentation from 36 hours to 22.0 seconds (a 5900-fold speed increase), and our software reduced data analysis time from 7.5 hours to 3.45 seconds (a 7800-fold speed increase). We reduced the cost of experimental materials by 85.2% while broadening the spectrum of discovery in gene therapy. Our comprehensive toolkit streamlines identification of genetic therapeutic targets, and will speed progress toward personalized therapy of a variety of diseases.