I coordinate the Valencia Biocampus team participating in the iGEM Synthetic Biology competition. Our 2012 project is Talking Life (http://2012.igem.org/Team:Valencia_Biocampus)
Do you speak to your bacteria? We do. We have designed, constructed and characterized an inter-specific translator based on light pulses that allows to literally dialogue with microorganisms. We have built seven biobricks with fluorescent proteins under the control of environmentally-sensitive promoters. The process is as follows: human voice messages are electronically- and then light-encoded in excitation wavelengths, and microbial proteins’ emission wavelengths are electronically- and voice-encoded back. We have used this system to find out the fermentative status of budding yeast and to dialogue with E. coli allowing it to answer questions such as “are you hungry?” The three pillars of our project (human practices, modeling and wetlab) yielded continuous feedback with each other, illustrating an integrated interdisciplinary approach. For example, in human practices, we qualitatively discussed the possibility of cheater mutant (“liers”), which was quantitatively supported by our results in both our modeling simulations and in the wetlab.
And for our Human Practices work, we even shot a short movie!
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