Design and evaluation of an incoherent feed-forward loop for an arsenic biosensor based on standard iGEM parts

GASULLA, JAVIER; BARONE, FEDERICO; DORR, FRANCISCO; MILDINER, SEBASTIÁN; MARASCO, LUCIANO E; PATOP, INÉS L; SOSA, SANTIAGO; VATTINO, LUCAS G; VIGNALE, FEDERICO A; ALTSZYLER, EDGAR; BASANTA, BENJAMIN; CARLOTTO, NICOLÁS; GIMÉNEZ, MANUEL; GRANDE, ALICIA; NIETO MORENO, NICOLÁS; BONOMI, HERNÁN R; NADRA, ALEJANDRO D

Synthetic Biology

Oxford University Press

Año: 2017 vol. 2

The diversity and flexibility of life offers a wide variety of molecules and systems useful for biosensing. A biosensor deviceshould be robust, specific and reliable. Inorganic arsenic is a highly toxic water contaminant with worldwide distributionthat poses a threat to public health. With the goal of developing an arsenic biosensor, we designed an incoherent feed-forward loop (I-FFL) genetic circuit to correlate its output pulse with the input signal in a relatively time-independent man-ner. The system was conceived exclusively based on the available BioBricks in the iGEM Registry of Standard BiologicalParts. The expected behavior in silico was achieved; upon arsenic addition, the system generates a short-delayed reporterprotein pulse that is dose dependent to the contaminant levels. This work is an example of the power and variety of theiGEM Registry of Standard Biological Parts, which can be reused in different sophisticated system designs like I-FFLs.Besides the scientific results, one of the main impacts of this synthetic biology project is the influence it had on team?smembers training and career choices which are summarized at the end of this article.