IGEM:IMPERIAL/2007/Ideas/Feasibility/IGEM2007

iGEM projects 2007

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Alberta:

• Producing biofuels, in particular butenal.
  • Propose to produce and optmise a bacterium for production of butenal i.e. increase the yield of production, decrease culture requirements and minimise other costs of final set up.
  • choosing to use Chlorobium tepidium as host organism to system.

Bologna:

• Producing a genetic schmitt trigger and possibly apply this to produce a biological oscillator.

CSHL:

• Engineer the behviour of a fruit fly by remote activation of neurons involved in reward and punishment.
  • Known: Fruit fly capable of learning through reinforcement
  • Apply reward and punishment in presence of certain stimuli - fly can make associations and learn to seek/avoid previous stimuli

Princeton:

• Chassis engineering: make engineering of biological systems easier
  • design a standard interface between an engineered biological system and its host cell or chassis
    

• Rebuilding T7 genome: modelable version
  • Produce high level population epidemic bahaviour

• Collaborative projects on Open Wet Ware(don't know if these are their iGEM projects):
  • Standard E. Coli strains for BioBricks in which more systems can be run
  • Standardised GFP quantification
  • Barcodes
  • BioBrick parts for plasmid engineering
  • Hydrogen photobioreactor
  • Error detection and correction in replicating machines

Naples:

• Engineer a synthetic biological network and modify saccharomyces cerevisiae cells so that the colour can be detected at different oleate concentrations
  • Parallel cloning and expresssion - two reporter genes cloned in parallel into a vector containing four different promoters

Mcgill:

• First project is looking at fluorescence complementation.
  • This is the idea that protein protein interactions can be measured and linked to the output of fluorescence.
• Second project is the biological repressilattor based on model proposed by Elowitz et al.

Paris:

• First project is to create a synthetic multicellular organism.
  • Idea to create artificial germ line cells that can develop into somatic cells.
    • Only the germ line cells have the ability to divide, but, germ line cells require somatic cells to produce key compound as germ line cells auxotropic.
    • This set up is hoped to provide the pressures for development and sustainment to a synthetic multi cellar organism.
• Third project is to produce fat absorbing bacterium.
  • Idea is to cause esterification of fatty acids and glycerol to provide a way to remove these products from the gut of an organism.

Virginia Tech.:

• Modelling dynamics of the spread of an epidemic within a population
  • Cover biology of teh phage-host interaction
  • Spread of phage within an isolated population
  • Spread of phage between artificially connected sub-populations