Team:UC Davis

From 2010.igem.org

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Revision as of 22:30, 27 October 2010

Welcome to our page! Our team is comprised of 8 dedicated individuals: 6 undergraduates and 2 advisors. This will be the second year that iGEM @ UC Davis participates in the competition. We are hard at work and are looking forward towards the completion of our project. Stay tuned for the upcoming results!

As we build our genetic circuit, we encountered a strange phenomena. The ligation of biobrick parts RBS-BBa_C0051 upstream to RBS-RFP resulted in red colonies. Transcription is occurring even though no promoter is present. Sequence analysis showed that we had the correct sequence. This prompted us to delve into investigation. We may have an idea on who the culprit is, lurking in the parts registry, waiting to ruin some poor team's project...

Throughout evolutionary history, spatial pattern formation has played a vital role in developmental biology. This is seen clearly in nature throughout the eukaryotic domain; examples include coat patterns (think zebras) and body segmentation (differentiated stem cells). We want to bring this sort of spatial pattern creation to the prokaryotic world. Previous iGEM projects have created patterns that require a projection of some sort of image before the cells react. We are engineering a strain that will create a pattern with no input from outside the system except an inducer.

This genetic circuit allows us to create biological systems with spatially varying genetic expression profiles. This has applications in a variety of fields such as nanofabrication, tissue engineering, environmental engineering, and of course, synthetic biology.

A good scientist always keeps a lab notebook at hand in order to keep track of what they do. This ensures that they have a written record of their data, allows others to retrace their steps, and most importantly of all, back up their research findings. Sift through our notebook pages to see how this project was built!

Get the big picture of what we are trying to build! Learn the logistics behind our circuit and how we implemented biological concepts to create a robust system.

Our parts didn't just come together magically. Learn about how we assembled our parts piece by piece! Also, stay tuned for possible protocols that may save you hours on your experiment.

Building our parts also include testing our parts and ensuring that they work, since we cannot see what is actually going on with the naked eye. Learn how we identified problems, validated our experiments, and how we overcame various issues.

Using mathematical modeling, we were able create a computer simulation of how our lawn of E. Coli will look like. The red plane in the center is the original stimulus that triggered the striping.

We would like to take a moment to thank all of our sponsors for their very generous donations, as we could not have done this without your help!

We would also like to thank and acknowledge:
Our Advisors
Marc Facciotti
Ilias Tagkopoulos
Technical Guidance
David Larsen
Andrew Yao
Visiting iGEMer
Jia Li of Zhejiang University (TEAM ZJU-China)
cI Promoter Screen
Drew Endy - Stanford
Thomas Schneider - NIH
Want to sponsor us? Send an email to mtfacciotti@ucdavis.edu to discuss various ways you can help! :)

No synthetic biology team should go without considering the potential dangers that their project(s) may cause! Because science can be prone to error, we ensured that our project is safe on many different levels.

Over the course of putting together our iGEM project, we have kept all goals in mind that may qualify us for a Gold Award Medal. In this section, we would like to directly address all the medal requirements listed on the iGEM Judging Criteria list.

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                <td class="kirby"><p class="indent"> A good scientist always keeps a lab notebook at hand in order to keep track of what they do. This ensures that they have a written record of their data, allows others to retrace their steps, and most importantly of all, back up their research findings. Sift through our notebook pages to see how this project was built! </td></tr>
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-                    <table><tr><td class="kirby" width="200px"><p class="header"><b>Overall Workplan</b></a><p> Get the big picture of what we are trying to build!  <p align="right"><a href="https://2010.igem.org/Team:UC_Davis/notebook/overallworkplan.html" class="help">Read more...</a></a></td>
+                    <table><tr><td class="kirby" width="200px"><p class="header"><b>Overall Workplan</b></a><p> Get the big picture of what we are trying to build!  Learn the logistics behind our circuit and how we implemented biological concepts to create a robust system. <p align="right"><a href="https://2010.igem.org/Team:UC_Davis/notebook/overallworkplan.html" class="help">Read more...</a></a></td>
 <td class="kirby" width="200px"><p class="header"><b>Assembly Workplan</b></a><p> Our parts didn't just come together magically.  Learn about how we assembled our parts piece by piece!  Also, stay tuned for possible protocols that may save you hours on your experiment. <p align="right"><a href="https://2010.igem.org/Team:UC_Davis/notebook/assembly.html" class="help">Read more...</a></a> </td>