Initial Ideas
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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
|
