Team:Penn State

Welcome to the Penn State iGEM page! Here you can find information on all of our projects, activities, progress, achievements, and much more. Please find the links in the menu.

Just as an overview, we are currently working on three projects that question the dogma of the Central Dogma of Biology. The Central Dogma is the commonly held belief that within biology, information flows from the order of nucleotides in DNA to the order of nucleotides in RNA and finally to the order of amino acids in a protein. These proteins then go on to complete a variety of functions that make life work.

Our first project is about Codon Optimization. In short, the amino acids that make up proteins can be represented by a variety of codons, groups of three bases, in the genetic code. This project looks into understanding which codons are biased and preferences in the E.coli genome. Our second project is studying the directionality of promoters. These are sequences in the DNA that indicate the beginning of a protein coding region. These help the DNA get transcribed into RNA. They are generally believed to be unidirectional, meaning they only cause transcription of the DNA into RNA in a single direction. This project is attempting to find out if this is true, or if some promoters can promote in both directions, and to what degree. Our final project involves the question of reading frame. It is known that a start codon needs to be at the beginning of a coding region for a ribosome to start translation from RNA to amino acid chain, but what happens when there are two start codons really close together and in different reading frames? This project is aimed at answering the question of what happens when there are two start points close together. This project will hopefully be able to determine preference for reading frame or preferred start distance from the Ribosome Binding Site (RBS).

Check out more in depth abstracts and explanations of our projects at our project page.

We are also excited to announce that we are working on an animation to better explain the Central Dogma of Biology. It is coming soon, so keep checking back for progress.