BU06:Research

From 2006.igem.org

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Sequence details

According to Tom Knight, the Photorhabdus luminescens luxCDABE operon that he cloned is NCBI accession number M90093. I checked this sequence against the biobrick restriction enzymes (EcoRI, XbaI, SpeI, PstI, NotI) using the Sequence Manipulation Suite. Results: EcoRI cuts at the ends of the sequence (+2 and -4; i.e., the original sequence is intended to be cut out of its vector with EcoRI); XbaI cuts in the middle (+2411); and SpeI, PstI, and NotI do not cut M00093. The question therefore becomes, did Tom Knight's group add or remove restriction sites? We have the DNA, we can test this in lab.

Brainstorming

• could we print LB + bacteria onto paper with an inkjet?
• what about printing the AHL quorum signals? Or other chemicals that could spatially control E. coli or compel them to do something (i.e. cause them to "print" or digest a substrate)?
• If we are successful with our light-repressed luminesence system, to what civic uses could we put it? Pathway / sidewalk lighting?
• What about re-engineering E. coli to repair things... such as fading paint on a building? I guess that's just like bioremediation.
• This is really wild: what if we understood the process from stem cell to tooth so well that we could predict and remodel the final structure using computers and then reprogram the stem cells for biofabrication? It wouldn't exactly be rapid prototyping, but it would be massively cheap!

Re: from what i thought, the understanding of stem cell lineage is not very well documented, with lots of discrepencies, and laboratory techniques to recreate them are few and very difficult! i may be wrong tho...

• I know people have transformed the membrane oscillations of yeasts into audible sounds (using an atomic force microscopes) and I wonder if E. coli could be signalled or manipulated in some way with acoustic waves.

--Mac 00:35, 14 June 2006 (EDT)