Project Abstract

Our team aimed to engineer a genetic toggle switch that allows yeast to express either green or cyan fluorescent protein (GFP & CFP) mutually exclusively. This is regulated at the translational level which provides a more efficient and quicker response than previous switches regulated at the transcriptional level, bypassing mRNA synthesis and export. This is a novel mechanism previously untried. Our biology team successfully tested the RNA-binding protein/fluorescent protein expression in yeast, at the single cell and population levels; provided the modelling team parameters obtained from experimentation and research; and sequenced BioBricks fused to GFP and CFP in yeast expression cassettes. Using this data our modelling team successfully created a deterministic and a stochastic model of how we expected the toggle switch to behave and found that the maximum success rate for our original set of parameters was 0.96%, but through theoretical modifications an optimal parameter set predicted a maximum success rate of 51.27%. Unfortunately time constraints prevented implementation of these adjustments to the system, a procedure we would recommend for further research.

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