From 2007.igem.org

Saint-Petersburg iGem2007 team

This year our team is participating for the first time in iGem2007 project.

Our team works at the [http://www.spbstu.ru Saint-Petersburg State Polytechnical University] in the department of Biophysics.

About Us

• Students:
  • Tatiana Moiseeva
  • Alexey Shalygin
  • Maria Ditina
  • Gennadiy Zakharov

• Our Instructors:
  • Evgeny Zatulovskiy
  • Vasiliy Romanov
  • Alexej Skvortsov

Our Project

General

The aim of our project is to build on the E.Coli bacteria the copper sensor. To solve this problem we need to use the copper-homeostasis system of E.Coli. The most convenient for our purposes protein is CusR, the component of the Copper-Responsive Two-Component System.

We intend to use the CusR promoter with the reporter gene to build sensor.

So we perform a theoretical study of this problem.

So, if we want to use only proteins without secondary metabolites, the best trigger sheme is the next:

In this scheme we can observe the switching between two repressors (x and y), depending on the transcription level from the copper-depended promoter.

But this scheme is rather difficult and need many constructing operations. So, we decided to think more simple scheme, using the secondary metabolites.