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Team:LMU-Munich/Spore Coat Proteins
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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Spore Coat Proteins
The aim of this project part is to create spores that display fusion proteins on their crust. There are several different proteins forming the spore coat layers of Bacillus subtilis spores. On the outermost layer, the so called spore crust, the CotZ and CgeA proteins are located ([http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=imamura%20et%20al.%202011%20spore%20crust Imamura et al., 2011]). This is why we used them to create functional fusion proteins to be expressed on our Sporobeads.
The gene cgeA is located in the cgeABCDEcluster and is regulated by its own promoter PcgeA. The cluster cotVWXYZ contains the gene cotZ which is cotranscribed with cotY regulated by the promoter PcotYZ. Another promoter of this cluster PcotV is responsible for the transcription of the other three genes. Those three promoters were evaluated with lux reporter genes to get an impression of their time of activation and their strength (see for more details Bacillus BioBrick Box) so they could be used for expression of spore crust fusion proteins.
Our first step will be to fuse GFP to these proteins to see if they appear on the spore surface and if there is any effect on spore formation. The next step will be to fuse proteins with special features to CotZ and CgeA to produce functional "SporoBeads." SporoBeads could be used to filter fluids or in the laboratory, and could be capable of:
- binding harmful viruses
- binding toxic metals
- binding plastic molecules
- exposing enzymes
Project Navigation
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Bacillus BioBrickBOX |
SporeCoat FusionProteins |
Germination STOP |
