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=Introduction= | =Introduction= | ||
ETH Zurich - educatETH E.coli System
"All E.coli 's are equal, but some E.coli 's are more equal than others..." (freely adapted from the Animal Farm by George Orwell)
... this is what George Orwell would have written, if he was a synthetic biologist. In the E.coli colonies on petri dishes, all bacteria are equal, except for some special ones. Our project is about modeling and designing these special E.coli that are "more equal" than the rest: they have the ability to recognize their environment and their story will be presented through this wiki ...
WORKING ON IT!
MISSING = WHAT IS EXACTLY THE SPECIAL THINGS THAT WE DID? DOUBLE PROMOTERS? BIOLOGICAL AUTOMATON WITH MEMORY? COOL WAYS TO EXPLAIN A BIOLOGICAL SYSTEM AS AN ENGINEERING SYSTEM? ROBUST SYSTEM (sensitivity looks pretty good to me...) WE CAN ADD A SECTION LIKE THAT HERE
Our combined team of biologists and engineers was working on the E.coli 's ability, first, to recognize two different inputs (here we used two different chemicals), second, to remember which input was presented to them, and third, when confronted with a new input, to recognize whether it is the one that it was trained with or not.
Thereby, the educatETH E.coli 's provide a first step towards the development of biological equivalents to complex engineering building blocks like, e.g. , flip-flops and other logical circuits. We also introduced the concept of double promoters to the [http://partsregistry.org/Main_Page Registry of Standard Biological Parts], which can be helpful for future projects. The concept of learning and recognition plays a major role in different high-level applications like, e.g., recognition of handwriting on a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_digital_assistant PDA] as well as biological applications. On the other hand, learning plays a major role for living organisms, as well: it enables them to survive by adapting to an ever-changing environment. Therefore, engineering a simple biological system which exhibits learning behavior is of great interest as it can support our understanding of this procedure by comparison with natural systems.
In the following, we would like to present you a detailed description of the proposed system: starting with the modeling of the system, we describe both, simulations and theoretical considerations of the system, as well as the actual implementation using bio-bricks accompanied by our lab notes. Additionally, you find some further information on the team, some more details about ideas we developed before we came up with the system we finally implemented, and some pictures documenting our work.
The ETH Zurich team consists of good mixture between biologists and engineering students, we are:
For more information about us, visit our Meet the Team page.
The idea for the project as well as its implementation was done by the ETH iGEM 2007 team. Still, we would like to thank the people in [http://www.ipe.ethz.ch/laboratories/bpl/index Sven Panke's Lab], especially Andreas Meyer who was always there for us when we had a problem. Additionally, we would like to thank [http://www.facs.ethz.ch Alfredo Franco-Obregóns lab] and Oralea Büchi for the help with the flow cytometry.
We would also like to acknowledge the financial support by [http://europa.eu EU], the [http://www.ethz.ch ETH Zurich], and [http://www.geneart.com GeneArt]:
| [http://europa.eu http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/~thohm/EU.gif] | [http://www.ethz.ch http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/~thohm/ethlogo.jpg] | [http://www.geneart.com http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/~thohm/geneart.gif] |
