SEED/2012/Overview

Objective

The goal of synthetic biology is to make it easier to engineer biological systems. Our lab work will focus on tuning, an important tool for engineering complex systems. Tuning means changing the numerical value of some trait of a part or device (such as the size of a structural protein or the reaction rate of an engineered enzyme), in order to achieve the desired behavior. In this project, we will assemble a protein coding gene with various promoters and ribosome binding sites, and quantitatively measure the resulting variation in protein expression. We will also measure expression driven by a chemically inducible promoter. These experiments will illustrate both static tuning via choice of DNA parts, and dynamic tuning via chemical supplement concentrations which can be changed on the fly.