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Celluar Lead Sensor
Lead poisoning is a public health concern - there is lead in soil, paint, water, and dust. Lead Poisoning is often caused by ingesting contaminated drinking water, or soil. It can cause neurological and gastrointestinal disorders, especially among children.
The legal limit of lead in drinking water is 15 parts per billion.
Current ways of testing for lead either require expensive chemical lab analysis or involve inaccurate home kits.
A lead detector, based on E. Col, is cheap, sensitive, quick, and specific
Our system involves a Lead detecting promoter, an amplifier, and an output of GFP. We're also working on a system to remove false positives.
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Tristable Switch
The purpose of the Tri-stable Toggle Switch is to produce three distinct, continuous, and stable outputs in response to three distinct inputs. These three inputs are three separate chemicals which will each induce one state of the switch.
In order to achieve this goal, we are constructing three constructs, each of which consists of a repressible, constitutively-on promoter attached to two repressors. Specifically, our three constructs are pBAD->LacI->TetR, pLacI->AraC->TetR, and pTet->AraC->LacI, where AraC represses pBAD, LacI represses pLac and TetR represses pTet. Each of the three repressors are inactivated by one of three chemicals, the three inducer chemicals mentioned earlier. These three(arabinose, IPTG (Isopropyl β-D-1-thiogalactopyranoside) and Tetracycline, respectively), cause conformational changes in their respective repressor proteins which leads to gene expression. For example, in the presence of arabinose, AraC cannot repress pBAD so LacI and TetR are produced which in turn repress pTet and pLac.
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