Revision as of 11:57, 24 October 2017

Week 1: 11 April - 17 April

Met up for the first time and were introduced to the IGEM and what it was all about. Started to do some research about what we can do as our project.

Adrenaline Start

The Ashesi iGEM started work about two weeks after their end of semester exams on the 22nd of May 2017. The first session was on bio-safety and general lab precautions. This lasted for about an hour and half. There was a mixture of anxiety and readiness amongst the team members to start engineering bacteria and change Africa!

Based on the series of meetings which took place last semester to research on problems identifiable in the environment, the team finally settled on a problem of regarding galamsey -illegal mining in Ghana. The process of illegal mining utilized mercury to coagulate gold elements from the gold ore. However these mercury elements are released as waste into water bodies after the gold element is separated from mercury upon heating. Mercury, a naturally toxic element enters aquatic organisms in the food chain and accumulates into more toxic forms which in turn poisons humans as well as other organisms in the ecosystem. The solution to this problem was to engineer a plasmid that senses mercury, binds to it and converts it into a less toxic form. This solution of sensing and detoxifying mercury seemed novel and a hopeful answer to Ghana's plea to save our water bodies from mercury contamination.

After two weeks of research and discussions, almost close to the peak of the design for our 'novel' idea, Nana Oye, a member of the team, discovered that our exact idea and design had already been worked on by an iGEM team in Brazil in 2015. This was a major blow to the team: enough to suck up all the adrenaline that existed in the beginning. It was surprising how we had not come across a mercury sensing and purification part in the iGEM parts throughout our research.

So we had to go home and start from scratch….thinking and dreaming new ideas to problems we could identify around us. Nonetheless, the clock was still ticking.

After days of nerve-recking anticipation and thinking, we finally decided that the problem of illegal mining was too important to leave unsolved. As a result, we decided to push our limits to try and design a more complex solution to solve to completely solve the problem by introducing a completely new way in which mining can to be done. We designed a new bacteria which would not only help detect and quantify the presednce of gold in ore but will also extract the detected gold from the ore.

We were very excited by our new idea. But the main question that remained was whether we could get it done in the little time that we had left.

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 <a class="exp" href="#url" tabindex="1">Week 6: 16 May - 22 May</a>
 <div class="exp">
+<p>
+	<ul>
+		<h1>
+			<b>
+				The sudden realization
+			</b>
+		</h1>
+		<li>
+			After days of nerve-recking anticipation and thinking, we finally decided that the problem of illegal mining was too important to leave unsolved. As a result, we decided to push our limits to try and design a more complex solution to solve to completely solve the problem by introducing a completely new way in which mining can to be done. We designed a new bacteria which would not only help detect and quantify the presednce of gold in ore but will also extract the detected gold from the ore.
+			<br>
+<br>
+			We were very excited by our new idea. But the main question that remained was whether we could get it done in the little time that we had left.
+		</li>
+	</ul>
+</p>
 </div>