Team:Johns Hopkins

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.