Team:Vilnius-Lithuania/Description
Project inspiration
One of the main aims of synthetic biology is the rational design of cellular functions. Besides, synthetic biology seeks to explore novel biological parts and assemble them to biological circuits for predictable cell behavior. Programmable biological circuits require a signal and the most common way is to use chemical inducers. However, chemical inductions are potentially toxic, have a delay in transport and are mostly irreversible, limiting its application on dynamic control of cell behavior. On the contrary, light is minimally invasive, a signal is delivered quickly with high resolution and shows satisfying reversibility. This approach provides new strategies to dynamically control cellular activities. Although over the past 15 years, studies on mammalian cells control with light made tremendous discoveries, optogenetic’s potential in bacteria is still highly underexplored.
Project inspiration
One of the main aims of synthetic biology is the rational design of cellular functions. Besides, synthetic biology seeks to explore novel biological parts and assemble them to biological circuits for predictable cell behavior. Programmable biological circuits require a signal and the most common way is to use chemical inducers. However, chemical inductions are potentially toxic, have a delay in transport and are mostly irreversible, limiting its application on dynamic control of cell behavior. On the contrary, light is minimally invasive, a signal is delivered quickly with high resolution and shows satisfying reversibility. This approach provides new strategies to dynamically control cellular activities. Although over the past 15 years, studies on mammalian cells control with light made tremendous discoveries, optogenetic’s potential in bacteria is still highly underexplored.