Optical Cell 2 Duo lac operon: Bridging the gap between Bacteria and Yeast
2009 October 28
Students from iGEM Harward team are using the optical communication to create a physically distributed lac operon between a bacteria and an yeast cell which normally occur within the same cell. Idea is to use the principles of synthetic biology to decouple the single cell lac operon events such as de-repression and transcription into two different cells in order to create a spatially separation between these events. In this new system bacteria send optical signal to yeast that the operon has been de-repressed and in response the yeast complete the operon’s function and express beta-galactosidase.
In summary,
In summary,
In this system, bacteria to communicate to yeast the presence of IPTG, which results in transcription of lacZ in the yeast cells. To permit bacteria to send an optical signal, we expressed in E. coli a red firefly luciferase under IPTG induction. To allow yeast to receive the signal, we used a two-hybrid-system based on the interaction between the red-light-sensitive Arabidopsis thaliana phytochrome PhyB and its interacting factor PIF3. Interaction between PhyB and PIF3 is induced by the red light from the bacteria, resulting in transcription of the lacZ gene.
Although optical communication between higher multicellular organisms is very common what you seeing here is the an optical communication system between a prokaryote and a eukaryote. By spatial seperation of the control and production units coupled with complementary features of bacteria and yeast makes this kind of setup more useful for the industrial applications such as large scale production of enzymes.
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Optical Cell 2 Duo lac operon http://bit.ly/E3nEq
Optical Cell 2 Duo lac operon: Bridging the gap between Bacteria and Yeast http://bit.ly/4zUwyA
Optical Cell 2 Duo lac operon: Bridging the gap between Bacteria and Yeast: Students from iGEM Harward team are.. http://bit.ly/4zUwyA
Optical Cell 2 Duo lac operon: Bridging the gap between Bacteria and Yeast http://tinyurl.com/yhludg2
Do you know how far they got with achieving that? Their iGEM presentation was really neat but it they never really clarified how much they’d actually managed to get done.