Why ayeSwitch?

For this year’s iGEM competition the Aberdeen team has worked on developing a translationally controlled toggle switch embedded in yeast. Genetic toggle switches are a vital component for synthetic circuits[1], enabling functional control of biological functions. The majority of toggle switches used for iGEM are embedded in Escherichia coli and can only be controlled at the transcriptional level , . Our main goal was to create and model a novel gene circuit, wherein yeast cells can be switched between mutually exclusive fluorescent proteins under exposure to environmental factors. This switching behaviour would be regulated at the translational level, an innovation over previous systems that only demonstrated transcriptional regulation , .

References

[1] Ernesto Andrianantoandro et al. Synthetic biology: new engineering rules for an emerging discipline Molecular Systems Biology 2:2006.0028