Team:Buenos Aires/Project/Abstract

From 2012.igem.org

Overview

We aimed to create a stable community of microorganisms that could be used as a standard tool in lab and industry. Our system would allow the co-culture of several genetically engineered machines in defined and tunable proportions, just like different species coexist in an ecosystem in nature. Hence the engineered organism would be a standard part! This defines a new level of modularity allowing the increase of the complexity of the system by moving to the community level.

In order to do this we´ve come up with several plausible circuits designs and made in silico predictions of their behavior. We decided to build a “crossfeeding” system in which each strain produces and secretes an aminoacid the other strains need to grow. We therefore characterized two auxotrophic yeast strains (for tryptophan and histidine) and designed novel biobricks that regulate the export of Trp and His rich peptides, therefore regulating the growth rate of the complementary strain.

In the future this would allow for other modules to control the proportions of each strain, thus allowing dynamic and stimulus dependent changes in the abundances of each strain. Equally important, as part of our human practices we became the fundamental stone of the iGEM community in Argentina and we started a cooperation with a local group of engineers in order to apply contamination detectors existing in the biobrick repository to solve local social and environmental problem.