Team:HKUST/Improvements
Improvements
2014 UCC Ireland
One of our project goals is to increase the production yield from our bacterial chassis, e. coli. The 2014 UCC Ireland team had successfully produced hagfish IF but the yield was not documented on their wiki. Protein expression rates could be adjusted, firstly, by using different constituent promoters (T7 promoter and K88 promoter) to increase yield, and secondly by using signal peptides for an alternative purification method.
There is a possibility that constant production of hagfish IF subunits without signal peptide will lead to accumulation of subunits inside the cell, which in turn decrease protein production efficiency and lead to cell death. Inclusion bodies would be retrieved by cell lysis. To counter this, a signal peptide will facilitate the transportation of IF proteins out of the cell. This keeps the chassis alive for a constant production of protein subunits, which could be collected constantly without killing the cell.
2018 Aalto-Helsinki
2018 Aalto-Helsinki team linked either a fluorescent protein (mRFP) or a chromoprotein (PrancerPurple) to their spider silk together with either a cellulose binding domain or a keratin binding domain as a dyeing method for materials with keratin and cellulose respectively. To further expand the color range of our hagfish fibers, we adopt the color mixing approach using only 3 chromoproteins: aeBlue (blue), eforRed (red), and amilGFP (yellow). By mixing the chromoproteins of 3 primary colors at different ratios, we could, at least in principle, produce fibers of a myriad of colors. This greatly enhances the color properties of our hagfish threads.