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Revision as of 22:34, 1 November 2017

Initial Ideas

insert Kushals icon here?

Possibilities

Idea Pros Cons
Disco Yoghurt - yoghurt that changed flavour upon exposure to different colour lights
  • Fun (would get to eat yoghurt)
  • Easy to generate monochromatic light
  • Bacteria respond to light already
  • Not really a ‘real world issue'
  • Would take a lot of work to generate different receptor/response regulator pairs
Fe. coli - absorbing iron in the gut to aid people who cannot absorb iron well; eg pregnant women
  • Easily applicable real world problem
  • Can follow and build on the work of previous iGEM teams
  • Lots of methods already exist to increase iron levels - why would synthetic biology be the one solution?
Circadian rhythms - modifying circadian rhythms with the aim of having a temporal release of a drug without having to remember to take it
  • Currently a very popular topic (see recent Nobel awards)
  • Could work as a foundational advance or as a therapeutic when applied
  • Very complicated topic!
  • Would first have to recreate the rhythm in E. coli before attempting to perturb it. Hard to validate.
Curli yoghurt - A yoghurt with a peptide that has emerging clinical value for patients with IBD
  • Access to a group of patients to survey, through team member
  • Clear real-world problem
  • Involves a currently-developing treatment - very relevant
  • Clinical trials may disprove the benefits of curli
  • May be hard to produce the complex peptide in E. coli
  • Hard to model
Biofilm plasters - Using biofilms to our aid to absorb pathogens that would otherwise infect a patient and may cause sepsis
  • Clear real-world problem
  • Clear applied design
  • We have good access to hospitals for research and advice
  • Hard to control a biofilm in the lab
  • Biofilms not well-enough understood to know obvious sites for perturbation