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Team:LMU-Munich/Germination Stop
The LMU-Munich team is exuberantly happy about the great success at the World Championship Jamboree in Boston. Our project Beadzillus finished 4th and won the prize for the "Best Wiki" (with Slovenia) and "Best New Application Project".
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Germination Stop
The goal of this project is to remove the germination capability, while keeping the necessary structural functions of the spores intact.
Based on the work of [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19554258 J. Kim and W. Schumann (2009)] and [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11466293 B. Setlow et al (2001)], we decided to knock out genes cwlJ, sleB, cwlB,gerD, and cwlD. The genes cwlJ and sleB code for lytic enzymes which are active in the process of germination. In the work of Setlow et al, when cwlJ and sleB were knocked out together, germination frequency was reduced by 5 orders of magnitude. When these genes are knocked out, we hope to yield a B. subtilis strain which produces spores incapable of germination.
Two methods are being employed to knock out germination: resistance cassette (RC) knockouts and clean deletions. Single RC knockouts were created, and have then been combined to create multiple knockouts.
This will be checked with germination assays.
Further, we will investigate the possibility of using a redundant toxin system to immediately kill off any spores which somehow germinate.
Project Navigation
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Bacillus BioBrickBOX |
SporeCoat FusionProteins |
Germination STOP |
