User:Federico Castro M/Undeveloped Ideas

These are ideas that are not completely developed; they might be very basic very crazy or form part of a project that is not currently developed. If you are interested in developing some of these ideas or are already working on them or something related, please contact me, I would be very glad to share information, collaborate and know about the outcome of the project.

1. To look for differences in genes associated with the development of the nervous system of chimpanzees and humans.
2. Given two identical populations that are independently subjected to identical evolutionary forces, we should expect to find a predictable rate of convergences. The rate of convergences gives us information about the topography of the adaptive map of the populations and how and where can it move.
3. The problem with antibiotic resistance and VIH drug resistance are evolutive problems. We could deal with the problem with an evolutionary approach; we should lead the bacteria or viruses to an isolated peak of adaptation and then submerge that peak.
4. Analyze LUCA (or at least read papers about it). The information about the Last Common Ancestor will provide us with information about the modules it had and this could be very helpful to create an organism from zero.
5. Promoters surely have different rate of change than the ORF they control. Do ORF evolve faster than promoters or viceverza? My guess is that changes in the promoters and not in the ORF account for the major differences betwen organisms… the activity of promoters makes up for the differences between a caterpillar and a butterfly and might also be accounted for differences between humans and chimpanzees.
6. Where did coat proteins of virus come from? How did they evolved? Are they ancient? They seem perfectly fit for protect DNA and their ancestors (or at leas similar analogous genes) might have served the same function eons ago.
7. The immune system uses a library of sequences to assemble a great variety of proteins. We could construct and use a similar library of proteins for protein design (The Silver/Phillips method of assembly would be very useful for achieving this goal).
8. Myxobacteria have the ability to generate complex structures. Could we isolate the genes responsible for that behavior and introduce it in Escherichia coli?
9. The homeotic genes have been extensively studied in plants and animals (MADS, Homeobox)... what about fungi and algae? Does regulatory genes have something in common? Could we isolate tose genes and insert them in bacteria?
10. A devise capable of certain function could be achieved, by randomly rewiring a genetic network with invertases and selecting the desired networks.
11. Make a self destructive F plasmid, this would allow some information to be quickly delivered and once it is expressed it would disappear. The plasmid should codify for a restriction endonuclease that would digest the plasmid to tiny bits of DNA, the endonuclease should be very specific and have a very long recognition sequence to ensure that the Bacteria will not be harmed. Agent Coli, This plasmid will be self destructed in 30 secs
12. We could use hormones as means of communication betwen bacteria, while there are some mechanisms implemented for communication, they lack the fast response that is often needed in a multicellular organism to coordinate cells (the molecule used by the luxR/l system as a signal, HSL, takes up to 24 hours to degradate). The system used for producing insulin and detecting the levels of sugars have already been developed by the NYMU 2007 iGEM team. It could be easily modified for communication between cells and the activity of the devise could be easily quantified with cheap medical equipments.
13. We could also measure POPs by other means than fluorescente shuch as the concentration of a diffusible insuline (insuline levels can be quantified very fast and cheap) or anthibiotic resistance (we could manually count the number of colonies). This could make the measurements of available to laboratories with no funds or equipment and perhaps it would make it all easier.