Team:UNAM-Genomics Mexico

The Gist

Synthetic Biology has been enabling changes in all bio-domains, one such being communication. Traditional cellular communication has relied since time immemorial on chemical messengers to exchange information. Regardless of their scope, these messengers are constrained to a system; eg: even far reaching couriers such as hormones are bound within the chemical structure that is the human body. But this is about to change.

In this project, our goal is to render the chemical barrier deprecated by using a non-chemical herald: photons. These will transport information between our engineered cells, creating a photon-based inter-cellular communication system.

These messengers are produced through bio-luminescent reactions, and are quite capable of traversing multiple environments. This enables the transmission of information beyond the chemical, biological, and even spatial limitations. As the courier is effectively decoupled from the chemical layer, it is an innovative step in establishing communications between organic-based and silicon-based systems, such as computers.

Movie

We made this short animation to show the concept behind our project.

Sponsors

As you are probably aware, most projects are unfeasible without economic support. Our iGEM project is no different. In this section we kindly thank our sponsors, whose help is greatly appreciated in aiding us with the development of this project.

[http://columbia.com.mx/ Columbia Group]

[http://www.ccg.unam.mx/ CCG]

[http://www.biosis.com.mx/ Biosis]