From 2007.igem.org

BactoCops - Imperial College iGEM 2007 Team

The Imperial College iGEM 2007 team consists of ten undergraduate students, as well as a number of graduate students and faculty supervisors. This year, we are engineering Bactocops, biological systems that report the presence of nasty bacteria. Under the Cell-Free Intelligence (CFI), we have two divisions. First, a surveillance team called Cell By Date that determines when food is spoilt more accurately than printed sell by dates. It exploits the thermal dependence of the rate of expression of a simple reporter system. The second division consists of an undercover team - Infector Detector, which detects biofilms that are antibiotic-resistant and a major source of infection in hospitals. This system makes use of Lux quorum sensing to eavesdrop on the communication between biofilm-forming bacteria.

Our contributions to the synthetic biology community will be the characterization of Cell-Free Chassis, the common platform on which Cell By Date and Infector Detector will be built. The cell-free approach is particularly useful for Bactocops to operate in the food and medical industries. This is because living, replicating engineered bacteria pose major health risks. We believe this new chassis will unlock fresh potential in simple constructs. Our project strategy is based on the Engineering Cycle, of which we have completed specification and design of the systems. We are starting on modelling and implementation and we aim to test our final constructs in the new chassis. By the end of the summer, the Bactocops will be combat-ready.

Have a look at our project on [http://openwetware.org/wiki/IGEM:IMPERIAL/2007 OpenWetWare].