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Overview

This part of the design will trigger the DNA degradation mechanism. To do so, we will use two different approaches. The first one, that we called "simple delay system", will be a way to trigger a restriction enzyme, which will cut the plasmid carrying the antitoxin, and thus let the cell sensitive to the toxin produced on the chromosome. In the "sRNA delay system, we use a different strategy. Here, the toxin would be cloned without the Immunity protein, in order to avoid any possible resistance to the toxin due to a non-degraded plasmid. To ensure that the toxin will not be produced while the cells are performing their function, we will use a stationary phase promoter and sRNA repression induced by arabinose.

Simple delay system

Objectives

Design

sRNA delay system

Objectives

As an alternative trigger to the «collective suicide» presented in the overview of the project, we tried to build a system in which the toxin would be cloned without the Immunity protein, in order to avoid any possible resistance to the toxin due to a non-degraded plasmid. Such a design comes with several difficulties :

• we need a very strong repression of the expression of the toxin. A leaky expression would harm the cells, and one of the risks is that mutants which do not produce the toxin arise and become selected.

• we need to be able to have a control on the delay, in order for the cells to trigger the safety mechanism only once they have performed their function.

• we need to be sure that the safety system will be triggered at one point. We prioritize the robustness of the delay over its timespan.

Design

In order to achieve our goal, we started form the construct of Yokobayashi et al. [1] described below.

Even though the cloning is still in process, we hope to build the following construct by the end of the competition.

Experiments and results

Characterisation of X

Experimental setup

Describe the experiment

Results

Present your results

Testing of the system

Experimental setup

Describe the experiment

Results

Present your results

References

1. Sharma, V., Yamamura, A., & Yokobayashi, Y. (2012). Engineering Artificial Small RNAs for Conditional Gene Silencing in Escherichia coli, 6-13. [http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/sb200001q| Paper]