Bacillus Booleanus was born as a project in which we were going to create several boolean operations following one another, specifically, two ANDs and one OR. Obviously, as with any other project, it came a time when we had to ask ourselves, how on Earth were we going to accomplish that?. Of course, quorum sensing has always been a common choice in the iGEM community when it comes to boolean operations, but we decided to try another perspective, and ta-da! Bacillus booleanus was born! We took advantage of the super-powers reported to exist in Bacillus subtilis by Ben-Yehuda et al. (1) to establish this communication. Probably the unsuspecting reader is asking herself, what could this said super-powers be? Well, in 2011, Ben-Yehuda et al. showed that Bacillus subtilis was capable of creating nanotubes between and within strains to send relatively big proteins and communicate between them. Who says that we are living in an isolating era?

Well, since these super-powers were not enough to fight crime, we decided better to insert into the chromosomes of two different strains of our beloved bacterium the same transcription factor, but regulated by two different promoters, each needing two input signals to be activated (imitating the computational ANDs), and in another strain a promoter that was activated by this transcription factor (imitating the OR).

Then, Bacillus subtilis (imitating Houdini) would make its magic and the different strains would communicate, creating a connection between three different Boolean operations. This would make us really happy.

(1) Dubey GP, Ben -Yehuda S.; Intercellular nanotubes mediate bacterial communication. Cell. 2011; 144(4):590-600.