Results

Although the Berkeley Test Cells showed an increase in fluorescence when exposed to sound. Further testing must be done to further characterize this initial response to sound. The Berkeley promoter BBa_K112402 was found to be a constitutive promoter. The same promoter, BBa_K112402, also shows a possible RFP upregulation when exposed to sound however further testing needs to be done to determine a more detailed relationship between amplitude, frequency and promoter upregulation. The FSU iGEM promoters: BamE, OsmC, and PspA also showed an increase in fluorescence after sound exposure.

In addition to characterizing the promoters proposed by UC Berkeley in 2008, we wanted to bring IGEM the BIOFAB collection of promoters. We picked three promoters, ApFAB90, ApFAB46, and ApFAB82. The activity of the promoters was characterized by inserting them into a PSCB1C3 plasmid which contained a red cassette that expresses RFP. We measured activity by using a ratio of Fluorescence to optical density and comparing initial and final values. We expected each promoter to behave with low, medium, and high activity respectively. The BIOFAB promoter behavior was not in the order that we were expecting. The apFAB46 showed the lowest activity but was expected to be the highest. ApFAB90 was found to have medium expression, however, was expected to be low activity. Finally, apFAB82 showed the highest fluorescence, however, was expected to be the medium expression. Further investigation is needed to determine these unexpected results.