Team:Alberta

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As a young team composed of high schoolers and junior undergraduates, we selected a project aimed at giving ourselves a firm understanding in the fundamentals of genetic engineering and control. The end goal of our project was to create spatial color patterns using bacteria, such as a color wheel and a rainbow, that required control over several color outputs in response to spatial gradients of chemical inducers. Colour gradients were achieved using a high-copy plasmid that contained both an inducible colour gene and its corresponding repressor. Colour banding was achieved by a novel means of adjusting gene expression through plasmid copy number control that varied from 0 to ~1000 copies/cell as a function of inducer concentration. Note that the rapid loss of plasmid that occurs in the absence of inducer also constitutes a novel and extremely effective safety switch for genetically engineered organisms which might enter the environment.

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