Project 1 Mexican Wave

FIRST VIEW

Our first thought was to create a pattern by the change of colors (by production of different fluorescent proteins) triggered by a signalling protein in a concentration dependent manner; so that the production of a protein as a result of the processing of a separete system, would trigger the pattern formation, just like a goal triggering a *Mexican wave in soccer games.

The idea was to have a plate having a lawn of cloned E. coli cells having 3 constructs. Each construct would have a promoter, which would be activated by a different level of the initial signal protein, and a coding part for a reporter fluorescent protein. In the figure below, red is represented to be the most sensitive reporter, activated by the lowest concentration. Yellow is sensitive to only a higher concentration and green requires the highest concentration,

The triggering protein (say protein A) would be dropped at the middle of the plate, creating a concentration gradient on the plate as it diffuses. According to this, the color change woulld be for once, and as concentration of A rises in time first at the middle then towards the edges, the colors will alternate from red to yellow to green, and eventally all plate will become green.

SECOND VIEW

The second view was to make this color change continuous and independent of a concentration gradient gradient created by us. So first idea came up to be coupling this oscillation to an already oscillating protein in the cell, such as a cell cycle protein. But then this oscillation will be observable only on a single cell unless we synchronize the cell cycles of different cells on the plate.

Mexican Wave