Team:BIOTEC Dresden/Brainstorming

Brainstorming

At the end of March the team has started to meet regularly to discuss and develop potential ideas for an iGEM project. This phase was accompanied by literature research, endless discussion with pizza, various presentations, talks from groupleaders and conversations with experts.

Phase 1 - Collection of ideas

Here you can find some of the ideas we came up with:

• Bacterial Sequencing
• Camouflage Bacteria
• “Poo be gone” system
• Bacterial sensor to differentiate between viral and bacterial infections
• Bacterial Metamorphosis
• Bacteriophage system that detects and specifically destroys tumor
• Yeast producing extracellular matrix
• Liposomes to collect and retain toxic substances in cigarette smoke while smoking
• Remodeling the dicer enzyme for producing longer and thus more specific siRNAs
• Recovery of iron oxide from waste water
• Bacterial scaffolding system for organizing functional materials for photo splitting of water
• Recycling of carbon dioxide into hydrocarbons for fuel production
• Development of biosensors with heritable, long-term, erasable memory using the prion concept

Phase 2 - Top ideas

Some of the ideas we had developed were researched in more detail to evaluate whether the project is accomplishable in 3 month.

Antimold

To target mold a foil-like material should deliver enzymes and substances to inhibit and prevent further growth of mold. Additionally a restoring of the original wall color was desired.

Pops

The idea of measuring PoPS (polymerase per second) in vivo or in vitro was discussed extensively. A novel approach using FRET should have been developed to analyse the activity of different promoters and gene regulatory elements.

Extracting phosphate from waste water

Wastewater is a rich source of phosphates yet is not been used for efficient recovery. The shortage of phosphate rock led to an increase in price of 600 % in the years 2007 and 2008. A yeast based approach using different bacterial and eukaryotic phosphate transport systems was thought to effectively collect phosphate from wastewater.

Finally, closing discussion at the end of June our project was selected to be SensorBricks.