Overview

Our project focuses on promoter engineering. Our goal is to characterize a set of promoters (of our design) by moving the repressor and/or activator binding sites with respect to the -10 and -35 regions of the promoter. Ideally, we would like to show that by moving an activator binding site it can become a repressor and that by moving a repressor binding site it may become either irrelevant to transcription rate or even boost it. We also want to see if there is a steep decline in repressor/activator function as the binding site move along the promoter or if it is a gradual/linear change. We believe this project could have application to genetic circuits by allowing a single protein to either activate or repress a promoter depending on where the binding sites are placed on the promoter.