Template:BOKU-Vienna/Description

Project Description:

Our project and the way we see it has evolved constantly since we started working on it. We started in January as we decided that we want to find a better way of protecting crops from pests, disease and harsh environmental conditions. Over time finding a solution against the harsh harvest losses farmers experience every year due to late frost in spring that kills the blossoms of fruit trees became one of our favourite applications for our system. We wanted to tackle this problem and others with a toggle switch that can control the moment when the trees should bloom. If the genes which control blooming are activated late enough, when late frost is very unlikely to occur, the harvest could be saved. As the project evolved and after a many discussions with people from different fields, it became clear to us, that a gene controlling toggle switch could also be of immense use in numerous fields outside of agriculture, such as plant molecular biology. It could become a universal tool used to toggle any desired gene. It could find applications in foundational research, for example when a scientist wants to study the effects a certain gene has on an organism or in biotechnology to induce the production of a compound later in the fermentation process. There are countless possibilities where a gene-toggling switch would be of use. Since our toggle switch works with a dCas9 system using specific guide RNAs for the activation or deactivation of every single gene, it is possible to have numerous genes that can either be toggled together or independently from each other. This also means, that by activating one toggle switch that produces a specific guide RNA of another toggle switch, the second one is only activated when the first one is activated. Following this idea, it would be possible to create whole logical systems using toggle switches with different guide RNAs. This idea is also the reason why we decided to sign up in the information processing track. We want to create a universal tool which allows us to create a logical switch in cells. Be it simply by starting / shutting down a single gene, or start the expression of a gene only when a complex combination of toggle switches is either activated or deactivated.