Design

The parts shown below apply to our study of the light operon.

Kill Switch for Engineered Bacteria

In 2016, we engineered E.coli to break down nitrogenous waste in Jamaica Bay. In 2017, we designed a light-activated kill switch to prevent our bacteria from surviving in saltwater outside of the waste treatment plant. We had two iterations of this design - one producing MazF which causes high cell death and one producing LacZ which allowed us to collect data and analyze expression levels without having to worry about high toxicity. Both versions utilized the pDawn promoter (BBa K1616019) which we characterized this year using models.