Team:KAIST Korea/Project Future

In mechanical engineering, various devices designed to operate the machine. Throughout our conceptual and applicable designs, we have tried to demonstrate the possibility of reproducing the scheme of mechanical engineering in “Biological Machine”.
Various result from our study shows that when the biological device, binary signal generator, is introduced into biological machine, the Escherichia coli cell, it can operate the system according to our intention. In application section, we have explained the bio-indigo production system which is operated in an accordance with change in AHL concentration.
Because the binary signal generator produce one out of two proteins with different orientation, we can apply the device to manage two pathways that are competing. If the resource to operate the pathway producing the protein we want is critical factor for cell survival, we can apply our device into biological machine. Arranging the genes for resource protein generating pathway and the target pathway genes in different orientation, we can make auto-regulated pathway that is operated by binary signal generator.
The specific example can be operating the 1,4-BDO pathway in E.coli. Because the enzymes participating in the 1,4-BDO pathway requires high NADH potential which is critical to cell survival, simple cloning of the enzymes can give harmful effect to the cells. So that, designing 1,4-BDO enzymes and NADH detector(or redox potential detector) at the both end of the binary signal generator, we can produce 1,4-BDO effectively not giving harmful effect to growth of Escherichia coli cells.


All of iGEM Team KAIST members spent the most hottest summer this year. We have learned about various experimental techniques, background knowledge and also about “Synthetic biology”. Because none of us had experienced about synthetic biology, we spent some time to make our topic to contain the synthetic biological meaning. However, passionate members of KAIST team were able to make the synthetic biology as our own knowledge thinking and thinking repeatedly.
Because we got our knowledge with constant efforts, we do not want our knowledge to fade out with completion of iGEM competition. We hope we can help following-up iGEM teams from KAIST, or in Korea even any countries in the World. And we think the synthetic biological insight will make our studies after iGEM to be more productive and creative.