Team:IONIS-PARIS/project/brainstorming process

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Brainstorming process

January

Team Building

From February to March

Mind Mapping on several project ideas:

  1. Moth and Cherry: It was a project to make cherry trees fighting against the moth (Drosophila suzukii) without using any pesticides or chemical products such as dimethoate. We had several ideas to fight against this problem, such as associating the dimethoate to a magnetic particle, in order to allow a magnetic cellular selection. We also thought about using Bacillus thuringiensis but that one will produce an other toxic molecule for the moth that will not perturb the human health.


  2. Plastic degradation: There has always been a big problem with plastic degradation. Several iGEM groups have already been working on finding solutions to reduce the plastic amount. We thought that we could study the last projects and add new characterizations of the existing bioparts, in order to express two enzymes and try to generate electricity. A system that would filter the water and in the same time degrade plastic residues. We also thought of isolating bacterial strains and study their growth in liquid media and also in solid containing hydrocarbons as the unique source of carbon.


  3. Bioluminescent pen: Modify the Ink to write bioluminescent. This project presented several problems, and the first one was the life length of the bacteria in the medium. The second one was that it can become a source of phosphate and therefore pollute the environment.


  4. Biological watch: We thought of making a watch in which we would introduce an enzyme that would consume all its substrate in a specific time, and beside a bacterium which expresses a gene as a function of the concentration of the substrate in the medium. Problem: recycling of the substrate in the medium.


  5. Thermosensitive bacteria: We studied the RNA thermometers and saw that several prior iGEM groups have tried without success to work on RNA thermometers, meanwhile we studied also chromoproteins (blue and red) and start to think what we could do with both of these. The first idea was to develop a synthetic tree using a self-made bioreactor (made by ourselves) that would have used the environmental factors to produce energy, which would be used to feed the bioreactor (zero waste). Inside the bioreactor, we would have introduced our engineered bacteria that would have changed its colordepending on the outside temperature: turning blue for low temperatures and red for high temperatures.

    At the end of March we decided to work on thermosensitive bacteria, because when comparing to the other project, it was the most realistic to work on (time, money and degree of difficulty.) This decision was not easy and was made thanks to the advice of our instructors and advisors.

April

Work on a synthetic tree (make a bioreactor that would be connected to the wifi and search for a design), the problem remained on the utility of our project. There was not any problematic to answer, nor any context. We saw that an important problem nowaday was all the crops that were killed due to extreme temperatures, affecting highly farmers. We start building our project focused on all the crops lost due to extreme temperatures.

From May to June

Development of the context of the project (the environment and the problems due to extreme temperatures). Work on the Human practice and the Applied design aspect of the project. We focused on vines, which is one of the most touched crop in our country (France) due to extreme temperatures.

July

Beginning of laboratory experiments.