Davidson 2006

Left to Right: Malcolm, Laurie, Sabriya, Erin and Lance Check out our Official Team Photo

Abstract Our goal is to engineer a biological system that can compute the solution to a classical mathematical puzzle called the Pancake Problem.

Project Overview

Who: The Mammoths, and FlapJack and the Pancakes

What: Our goal is to solve the Pancake problem[1] in a biological system.

When: Summer and Fall '06

Where: Missouri Western State University and Davidson College

Why: Because we love breakfast... well most of us.

How: Trying to invert antibiotic resistance genes using the Hin/Hix inversion method found in Salmonella typhimurium.

• Our overall goal was to see if we could use synthetic methods to construct an E. coli computer. If we grew 10¹⁵ cells, and each cell was attempting to solve the problem, then even rare events might be solvable by E. coli computers.

• We decided to tackle the burnt pancake problem since DNA, like burnt pancakes, has a directionality. We needed a way to flip the DNA and chose the Hin/Hix system. We had to isolate RE, HixC from S. typhimurium strain XX (need to insert name), and Hin from S. typhimurium, strain TA100 .

• We decided to test the size constraints first, so we are building stacks of pancakes only one high at first. We will try to flip the promoter (smaller) in one case, and the coding region (bigger) in another case. The coding region is Tet^R resistance gene isolated from a plasmid in the Registry. For higher stacks of pancakes, we will also use chloramphenicol^R and cycloheximide^R.

Students