Team:Carnegie Mellon

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Contents 1 Introduction: Motivation 2 Primary Objective: A Useful BioBrick for Synthetic Biologists 3 Secondary Objective: Humanistic Practice 4 Further Considerations

Introduction: Motivation

• We seek to develop a BioBrick that will allow researchers in the field of synthetic biology to accurately measure a variety of metrics in gene expression networks including translational efficiency and transcriptional strength.

• We believe that we can use Spinach (a fluorescent RNA sequence) and a FAP (fluorogen activating protein) as biosensors to reflect these metrics in vivo, rather than in vitro, which has previously proven to be very costly and impractical.

• We will characterize the relationship between genetic expression of Spinach (upstream), a FAP (downstream), translational efficiency, and transcriptional strength.
  

Abstract/Introduction

Motivation question

Humanistic implications go here

Primary Objective: A Useful BioBrick for Synthetic Biologists

We believe the development of this unprecedented BioBrick will help synthetic biologists in a variety of applications, for a variety of purposes such as the following:

1. Quantifying translational efficiency in vivo
2. Troubleshooting in expression strains
3. mRNA and protein localization
4. in vivo transcription rate analysis
5. Determining promoter strength in vivo
6. in vivo mRNA and protein half-lives
7. Introducing a protein reporter that has virtually no maturation rate and is limited only by the very quick absorption rate of the fluorogen into the cell
8. Introducing a functioning mRNA reporter
9. Providing a method to better characterize current and future BioBricks

Our proposed BioBrick is novel, and potentially very useful in practice.

Secondary Objective: Humanistic Practice

FAQ/Terminology in engineering Escherichia coli to monitor these variables via fluorescence. Find out more about Carnegie Mellon: (CMU Home Page).

Further Considerations

In the pursuit of our project, as well as the biological aspects, we:

• Considered aspects of scale-up, including the ethical, legal and social implications of our BioBrick,
• Programmed a new piece of software for modeling our BioBrick to students,
• Developed and tested techniques for measuring translational efficiency and transcriptional strength,
• Participated in human practices demonstration and modeled our biological system using a programmable and interactive, electrical analog.