Team:Queens-Canada/idea

Brief Summary

Our main goal for this summer is to build a toolkit for the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans for use as a synthetic biology chassis. Our focus is on finding and selecting viable promoters, protein domains, and other components for use by future teams.

The motivation for our project is simple enough: to date, there has been little interest in using complex eukaryotic and multicellular organisms in iGEM, and we feel that the advantages of multicellular organisms outweigh the challenges involved in working with them.

To demonstrate our new chassis, we also intend to create a demonstration project in which C. elegans ferries Escherichia coli from one location to another using chemotaxis. This is a relevant demonstration of C. elegans because of its high rate of locomotion (covering as much as 4.5 cm/min), and also provides a kind of backward compatibility, in that familiar E. coli projects like biosensors will be able to take advantage of our C. elegans work with a minimum of fuss.

However, the main focus is not on this symbosis across billions of years of evolution, but on encouraging other teams to embrace the potential benefits of working in a complicated organism like C. elegans, which has been extensively studied as a model organism for developmental biology and was the first multicellular organism sequenced. As such, it represents the best opportunity for synthetic biology to make inroads into higher forms of life.