Team:Johns Hopkins

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JHU.

Johns Hopkins University

Genetically engineered Saccharomyces cerevisiae that is responsive to voltage signals at a transcriptional level.
We have hijacked the calcium shock, calcineurin-CRZ1, pathway in yeast and encoded a reporter. In doing so we have characterized the voltage dependency of the CRZ1 binding site (CDRE) and so taken the first step in creating a interface between cellular systems and computers by allowing cells to respond to the language of computers, voltage signals.



Team: We are a team of 9 undergraduate students deeply interested in synthetic biology. We hail from a variety of disciplines including, chemistry, biology and engineering. We’re a fresh new team with varying levels of experience united by our passion for science.

Our Sponsors

  • JHU Biology, esp. Dr. Beverly Wendland
  • JHU Biomedical Engineering, esp. Dr. Elliot R. McVeigh and Gail Spence
  • JHU Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
  • JHU Alumni Foundation
  • JHU Provost’s Undergraduate Research Award
  • The Hodson Trust
  • JHU Integrated Imaging Center, esp. Dr. Richard McCarty and Erin Pryce
  • JHU Undergraduate Admissions, esp. Maggie Kennedy
  • JHU BAG
  • JHU HiT Center

Our Accomplishments

  • We have extended previous work on voltage sensitivity (Valencia 2009) in S. cerevisiae, bringing the response from the biochemical domain into the transcriptional.
  • We constructed a library of 7 voltage-activated yeast upstream activation sequences with varying sensitivity.
  • We have characterized two full voltage-activated promoters for yeast.
  • We have developed a model to describe the transcriptional response to voltage of our system.
  • We fabricated a simple preliminary electro stimulation setup.
  • We developed and optimized a high throughput electro stimulation setup using coaxial gold electrodes.
  • We fabricated a highly accurate microfluidic electro stimulation setup using gold electrodes on a silicone wafer and are currently in the process of optimization.
JHU iGEM 2010