Question

This new company wants to target a new market: genetic engineering for home and office decoration.

Here's their plan: they want you to create a bacterial culture that will not only fluoresce in dim light, but also fluoresce in an oscillatory manner.

Given your experience with operons, you decide that you'd probably start there...

Here's one hint: to make cells fluoresce, you can make them express a protein called Green Fluorescent Protein (or GFP). This protein is not naturally produced by bacteria, but they can express it if you introduce the coding sequence for GFP in the right bacterial genetic context. In this case, you may want to introduce the GFP coding sequence somewhere into an operon of your own design.

The real challenge, however, is to make its expression oscillate. In other words, how can you design an operon such that its expression will turn ON and OFF spontaneously giving rise to cycles of GFP expression ?

Upload a map of your operon, and a brief explanation (200 words or fewer) of how it would work

Also, you may also use mutant bacterial strains that lack one or more of the components of an operon, if that allows you to have better control over your artificial operon. It may sound like cheating, but scientists and genetic engineers need to use these so-called "mutant backgrounds" all the time.

Answer 1

Bacteria that lacks it's own repressor and inducer molecules (mutant that is devoid of inducer and repressor to be produced on thier own can be used.

Using mutant bacteria we can transform the operon containing GFP gene and we can supply the growth medium with inducer and repressor whenever we want to switch it on and switch it off the production of GFP.

The operon containing plasmid can be transfected inside the mutant bacteria and operon consists inducer binding site ( promoter) repressor binding site ( repressor ) and GFP gene coding region and also termination sequence.

Structure of operon is