Developing a synthetic promoter toolbox for
​fine-tuning gene expression in Vibrio natriegens

Over the past year, the UCLA iGEM team has been hard at work manipulating the transcriptional machineries of Vibrio natriegens (V. natriegens), an industrially relevant salt-marsh bacterium with the ability to grow twice as fast as E. coli. As a characterization project, we set out to compare the relative activities of the same promoters in V. natriegens and E. coli to develop a "toolbox" of relevant promoters that span a dynamic range of expression. We believe that our results could have the potential to help future researchers in a wide variety of applications, from discovering resemblances in genetic architecture across many species to controlling the yield of chemical products in metabolic pathways as the field expands to industry. 

Winnie presenting our VMAX project at UCLA's Biomedical Research Summer Symposium!