Team:Penn/LightActivatedOverview

In order to develop a module for light activated cell lysis, we had to implement two elements:

1. A light-activation system that can express a gene of interest
2. A cytotoxic protein that can be expressed as our therapeutic drug to lyse cancer sells

After reading many papers to select an appropriate light-sensing system to use, we selected the YF1/FixJ blue light system. We had also considered the red light sensor Cph8 but ultimately decided on YF1/FixJ because of its high on/off ratio of gene expression and also because of its availability to us (we were fortunate enough to come across the YF1/FixJ system in the form of the pDawn plasmid from the Moglich lab in Germany).