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Project ZombiE.coli

UT’s ZombiE.coli aims to a develop a tightly regulated genetic switch that is triggered by bacterial quorum signaling and leads to feed-forward propagation of the genetic output in the form of red or green fluorescence as well as amplification of quorum signaling. The switch relies on simple one-way Cre/loxP recombination combined with native quorum signaling to provide us with a system that models transmissible disease spread between populations. We have likened this to an airborne zombie epidemic, in which a an “infected” zombie cell is capable of restructuring the genes of a normal cell, turning it into a flesh-hungry counterpart. This system will be useful not only as a simple disease outbreak model for intermediate-level biology education, but also, could provide new insights to how bacterial populations communicate in three dimensions and under different genetic backgrounds.