Team:ZJU-China

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This year, the ZJU-China iGEM team aims to design and realize a tunable RNA scaffold to accelerate biosynthesis pathways and turn their on and off. As one of the most vital biomacromolecules, RNA plays a crucial role not only in coding process, but also in non-coding one. RNA scaffold is designed to colocalize enzymes through interactions between binding domains on the scaffold and target peptides fused to each enzyme in engineered biosynthesis pathways in vivo, which may suffered from low efficiency of production caused by relative lack of spatial organization of non-homologous enzymes. The scaffold allows efficient channeling of substrates to products over several enzymatic steps by limiting the diffusion of intermediates thus providing a bright future for solving the problem. Meanwhile, we plan to add an aptamer structure on RNA scaffold as a riboswitch to regulate biosynthesis pathways by micromolecular ligands. Then we can control the all-or-none binding relationship between the enzymes and RNA scaffold by whether the special ligands are presented or not.

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 {|align="justify" 2012 marks the fourth year of the Cornell iGEM team's participation in the competition. Last year we did [https://2011.igem.org/Team:Cornell very well], and this year we aim to do even better!
-Canadian oil sands are a vast oil reserve that, given rising prices of petroleum, are an attractive alternative to traditional sources of crude oil. However, there are numerous public health and environmental concerns regarding the oil sands extraction process. One environmental concern is the contamination of Canadian watersheds by seepage from tailings ponds. To better monitor this issue, we will engineer a novel biosensing platform with the electroactive bacterial species Shewanella oneidensis MR-1, which has the unique capability to directly transfer electrons to solid-state electrodes. We plan to exploit this feature by genetically manipulating S. oneidensis MR-1 to upregulate its metal- reduction capacity in the presence of analyte to generate direct current output in a whole-cell biosensor. Our goal is to develop a fully autonomous electrochemical biosensor that complements the current oil sands monitoring system by providing real-time data over extended periods of time. Furthermore, our device will circumvent the costs and complications of producing and maintaining photodiode circuits used for data acquisition in bioluminescent reporter systems by instead producing a direct electrical output. While our platform is adaptable to sensing a wide range of analytes, we will initially focus on arsenic-containing compounds and naphthalene, a polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) – known contaminants of oil sands tailings ponds. We believe that our biosensor will be a valuable tool for remote, continuous, and long-term monitoring of pollutants in rivers and key waterways.
+This year, the ZJU-China iGEM team aims to design and realize a tunable RNA scaffold to accelerate biosynthesis pathways and turn their on and off. As one of the most vital biomacromolecules, RNA plays a crucial role not only in coding process, but also in non-coding one. RNA scaffold is designed to colocalize enzymes through interactions between binding domains on the scaffold and target peptides fused to each enzyme in engineered biosynthesis pathways in vivo, which may suffered from low efficiency of production caused by relative lack of spatial organization of non-homologous enzymes. The scaffold allows efficient channeling of substrates to products over several enzymatic steps by limiting the diffusion of intermediates thus providing a bright future for solving the problem. Meanwhile, we plan to add an aptamer structure on RNA scaffold as a riboswitch to regulate biosynthesis pathways by micromolecular ligands. Then we can control the all-or-none binding relationship between the enzymes and RNA scaffold by whether the special ligands are presented or not.
-In order to build and test this device, we plan to:
-: Synthesize novel reporter strains for the production of electrical output in response to arsenic and the PAH naphthalene.
-: Characterize electrical output of reporter strains in response to the pollutant of interest.
-: Optimize this response for relevant concentrations of pollutant in water samples.
-: Construct a functional prototype for an affordable, field deployable device.
 |[[Image:ZJU-China_team.png|center|thumb|900px]]
 |}