ETHZ/Wiki rel

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Revision as of 14:35, 16 September 2007 by Cbergeles (Talk | contribs)
Eth zh logo 2.png
Main Page      Biology Pespective      Engineering Perspective      Meet the Team      Team Notes      Pictures!


.:: ETH Zurich - E. Coli Intelligence ::.

.:: Introduction ::.

The Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich is participating for the 3rd year, at the International Geneticaly Engineered Machines (iGEM) Competition. Our combined team of Biologists and Engineers has undertaken the task of "Educating E. Coli" (see Fig. 1). After elaborating ( :) ) on the definition of learning, we drew ideas from the field of logic design, and we are trying to create E. Coli with the ability to recognize the chemicals that they are exposed to, based on a previous training phase.

This page presents the basic ideas of our project. In the Biology Perspective, you can find details on the biological system that we are trying to implement, the parts it consists of, and our biological experiments. In the Engineering Perspective, you can find the governing equations of our biological system, its modeling, and the simulations that we have carried out. In Meet the Team, you can find more information concerning the member of the ETH Zurich team. In Team Notes, you can find notes taken during the preparation process, to facilitate the communication between the team members. Lastly, in Pictures!, you can find our ETH Zurich preparation gallery :).


.:: Team Members ::.

Since this is a Synthetic Biology competition, the ETH Zurich team consists of balanced amounts of Biology students, and Engineering Students.

For more information on the team members, follow the links, or visit the Meet the Team web page.


.:: E. Coli Intelligence (E.I) ::.

How can we make E. Coli bacteria able to report us about their environment? Can we teach bacteria to recognize a specific chemical?

EducETH E. Coli System
Based on these questions we set forth to designing biological circuits to educate E. Coli cells, and to improve the E. Coli Intelligence...

Our goal is to design an E.coli strain, able to distinguish between two chemical substances after an assigned learning process. The learning process is induced by an external chemical signal (teaching substance). Afterwards, the bacterial strain will be taken to a testing phase, where the output will be in either green or red fluorescence, depending on whether the bacteria recognized the same chemical substance in the testing phase as it was trained in the learning phase or a different one.

In order to come to this idea for implementation, we had a discussion based on ideas from Logic Design. A toggle that keeps it state, can be a JK flip-flop with a latch. Reporting circuits can be constructing using AND gates, where the inputs are the chemicals, and the previous state of the JK flip-flop. In Fig.2, we present the blending of the engineering and biological perspective.


To do:
  • Need picture: EducETH Ecoli
  • Need picture: Bacteria red, Bacteria Green, two pictures showing different exposure to chemicals
  • Need picture: Einstein ecoli
  • Need text: Project description
  • Stupidity: All E. Colis are equal, but our E. Colis are more equal than the others :D