bio.display

After ample waiting, finally we got the TorA-GFPmut3* E. Coli strain from Professor Conrad Mullineaux‘s lab, from the School of Biological and Chemical Sciences at the Queen Mary University, London. This is the bacteria strain we’ll begin working with at first, and is mentioned in the Wilks article. It has the nice feature that it includes a certain version of the Green Fluorescent Protein that changes the level of fluorescence depending on the surrounding pH value – thus one can turn it ‘on’ or ‘off’ by pouring acid on it.

The package came with the instructions written by Anja Nenninger, address to Anne Kienhuis, Scientific Manager of The Arts & Genomics Center:

Hi Anne,
Here are two tubes with E.coli strian MC4100delta ABCDE pBad24_TorA-GFP. The cells are growing on LB amp¹⁰⁰ plates. To induce the plasmid I grow an over night culture and than add 500μl of the over night to 9.5 ml fresh LB and 200μM L-arabinose (+/- ampicillin). After 2 to 3 hours the cells should glow.
Anja

Sounds nice.

But, this is the theory, and we’ll have verify it in practice, and see if this can be used as the base material for the display project.