Our Sponsors
Geneious, Thomas Scientific, Integrated DNA, New England Bio, Aether Bio, and Dean of Students and Dean of Engineering at UCSC
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1156 High St, CA 95060, US
Our primary objective was to improve the efficiency of genetic transformation in cyanobacteria. These organisms are polyploid, meaning they possess multiple sets of chromosomes, unlike humans, which are predominantly diploid.
Existing cyanobacterial transformation methods rely heavily on chance and the cell's natural homologous recombination repair mechanisms. The process involves creating a break in the DNA at the desired insertion site, hoping that the introduced genetic material will integrate into the genome. However, this approach lacks precision and can be time-consuming due to the random nature of the DNA breaks.
To demonstrate the effectiveness of our "accelerator" tool, we will measure the GFP fluorescence (normalized to cell count) at 680 nm in cyanobacterial cultures both with and without our accelerators. From this experiment we expect three possible results:
Ideally, we would observe a left-shifted curve, similar to the green one, in our cyanobacterial cultures with accelerators.
This would indicate the successful acceleration of stable transformant generation.
However, if the curve resembles either of the red curves, it would suggest that our accelerators are not functioning as intended.
References
[1] Figures (by appearance) 1, 3, 4 made in BioRender. “Scientific Image and Illustration Software | BioRender,” Biorender.com, 2024. https://www.biorender.com/