IGEM:IMPERIAL/2007/Ideas/Feasibility/IGEM2007

iGEM projects 2007
-  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: Princeton:
 * 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
 * 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

Naples: Mcgill: Paris: Virginia Tech.:
 * 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
 * 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
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * 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