User:Jonathan Cline/Notebook/Melaminometer/Project Considerations

Project Considerations

 * Melamine, cyanuric acid, and the related herbicide Atrazine has several decades of research due to the common industrial use of these chemicals. The project is assisted considerably by this foundation of research.
 * Sufficient documentation of the enzymes, plasmids, and microbes has been found during initial project feasibility phase. This is good news.
 * Industrial/commercial testing is geared towards reliability and quantification, without significant emphasis on cost or point of care use. Thus commercial testing/detection methods have different goals than this project.  This project aims to be simple, low cost, and usable "at home", thus needs to solve different problems than industrial testing.  This project can sacrifice some reliability of detection results for the higher priorities of those aims.
 * This project is timely, as melamine contamination is featured nearly every day in the asian news headlines. This is an important problem which needs a timely solution.