Can sound be used to induce gene expression in engineered E. coli? What frequencies, amplitudes, and length of time exposure effect gene expression the most?

Today, it is routine to induce the expression of a gene in E. coli using small molecules such as arabinose, lactose, and rhamnose. Can sound become a routine means to induce gene expression in engineered E. coli? Our project, Audiogenetics, offers a new foundational advance to the synthetic biology community. Slovenia’s Sonicell and SUS Tech’s Cearll’s Secret projects pursued a similar question in mammalian cells. We characterized putative promoters expected to be at end of a signal transduction pathway responsive to sound submitted by the 2008 Berkeley team In parallel, we studied genes that, according to published scientific reports, are up-regulated when bacteria are exposed to sound and identified the promoters expected to be involved in that system. These selected promoters were used to design new genetic devices that generate fluorescent reporters when the cells are exposed to sound. We used our designed genetic devices to correlate levels of gene expression with frequency, amplitude, and exposure time.

Audio induction has many possible impacts, the limit to which is still unclear. Our Human Practices team has started a discussion in the fields of molecular biology, brewery, and law enforcement to explore the potential positive and negative impacts of using sound to induce gene expression.

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