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: Plastic degradation has always been an important issue worldwide. Several iGEM groups have already been working on finding solutions to reduce global plastic amount. We thought that we could study the last projects and add new characterisations 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: We thought about creating a bioluminescent ink. 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 could become a source of phosphate and therefore pollute the environment.


  4. Biological watch: We had the idea of creating a biological tool to model time. We could have made a watch in which we would have introduced 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 with those systems. Meanwhile, we also studied several colored proteins (blue and red) and started to think of what we could do with them. The first idea was to develop a synthetic tree using a self-made bioreactor. This device could have been fed using its surrounding environment. Inside the bioreactor, we would have introduced our engineered bacteria that would have changed its color depending on the outside temperature: turning blue for low temperatures and red for high temperatures. Such a tree could have served as a decorative element in addition to its capacities of visually reflect outside temperatures.

    At the end of March we decided to work on a thermosensitive microorganism, since this seemed the most realistic project to work on compared with the other ideas (time, money and degree of difficulty.) Moreover, the concept was poorly developed until now and could find many useful applications. 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 but simply a decorative object. As we were working on temperature changes, we thought about the recent climate changes and saw that the crops were significantly suffering from their consequences, having a drastic economic impact on farmers. We were convinced that our thermo-sensitive biological tool could have a real positive impact in this context, and decided to turn our microorganisms into plant protectants.

From May to June

Development of project context (environment and problems due to extreme temperature events). We progressively started to build all the different aspects surrounding the project (human practices, applied design, modeling parts), and made a lot of bibliographic researches on the subject! Throughout our findings towards plant physiology and microbiota, and given the large inter-crops diversity, we thought that focusing on one crop type only would make the product development much easier. We chose to focus on grapevines, which is one of the most affected crops in our country (France) because of extreme temperatures. And of course, vineyards are our French icon, but we never forgot all the further potential applications of the so-born Softer Shock technology !

July

Beginning of laboratory experiments.