Team:Paris Bettencourt/Overview

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Delay system: This module will permit our bacteria to perform its function during X amount of time before triggering the degradation and suicide of the bacteria. Principle: In presence of Arabinose, LacI is produced repressing the expression of a restriction enzyme. Once Arabinose is not anymore present, the LacI repressor concentration goes down with dilution and degradation leading to the expression of the restriction enzyme.

Restriction Enzyme system system.

The suicide system is a variation of a toxin-anti-toxin system, and consists of a lethal DNA cleaving protein which is bound with high affinity by the anti-toxin immunity protein. The anti-toxin plasmid carrying the immunity protein, when combined with the restriction enzyme system, is degraded on a tunable delay. Once the anti-toxin plasmid degrades, the toxin kills the cell, its neighbors, and eliminates extracellular DNA via its DNase activity.

Semantic Containment.

Toxin/anti-Toxin system.

Objectives

Our project aims to:

• Raise the issue of biosafety, and advocate the discerning use of biosafety circuits in future iGEM projects as a requirement
• Evaluate the risk of HGT in different SynBio applications
• Develop a new, improved containment system to expand the range of environments where GEOs can be used safely.

To do so, we:

• Engaged the general public and scientific community through debate
• Raised the question about how we can regulate this practices
• Compiled a parts page of safety circuits in the registry
• Relied on three levels of containment :
  1. Physical containment with alginate capsules
  2. Semantic containment using an amber suppressor system
  3. An improved killswitch featuring delayed population-level suicide through complete genome degradation.

We strived to make our system as robust against mutations as possible.

Step 1

Step 2

Step 2.

Step 3

Step 3.