01/04/2021 Meeting - Recap

[Zoepin]

This is just a short recap of the meeting

01/04/2021 Meeting - Recap

We all agreed minicells had a lot of potential and would be great to include in our iGEM project. They have great potential for applications. They represent a great improvement in biosafety because they do not proliferate.

Imran is working on

• creating a system in which minicells are inducible
• determining the lifespan of a minicell
• how many proteins a minicell can produce Wednesday 07/04 we can expect his first feedback/proposal for the project.

The idea for our iGEM project

The idea would to integrate the minicells as effectors of our circuit. We would have sensor => relay => production of minicells with a specific purpose.

To do for our next meeting

• Look into the iGEM Marburg 2015 and Edinburgh 2018 project on minicells. What did they do? How is that useful for us? Are there any redundancies?
• Find applications for minicells
• Is mini cell diffusion faster then for normal cells?

[Zoepin]

Idea that emerged from the meeting. I did not include it in the recap because it has not been agreed on.

We could transform the mother cells with a high copy number plasmid. While in the mother cell, these would be repressed. When the mother cell produces minicells, some of the plasmids would be transferred in the minicells. This would allow the expression of the plasmids. The protein(s) produced would be the effector.

Effector ideas we came up with:

• Kill the mother cell
• Kill the minicell
• Classic effector

It would be so cool to have various mother cell populations with different plasmids. Therefore we could have multiple effectors and even imagine a small circuit between the minicells. This is going way overboard...