IGEM:TUDelft/Brainstorm

Brainstorm area

Some ideas posted by other teams can be found at the Idea exchange page.

Biofuels

Styrene Production

Styrene is a hydrocarbon used in several field of chemical engineering and, of course, as biofuel. Some previous experiences on E. coli transformation for styrene oxide production have been reported here.

Hydrogen Production

Hydrogen is not properly a biofuel but is a very active molecule in biological systems and perhaps engineering an organism able to produce it could be an easily affordable task. Check this link for further info.

Information processing

Schmitt trigger

Bologna worked on a Schmitt trigger last year (University of Bologna 2007). Domenico already gave an explanation about this device. The project is also very well documented so have a look at their site. More about the Schmitt trigger can be found here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schmitt_trigger).

What can be done with a Schmitt trigger?

• Create some kind of oscillator - I think Domenico also mentioned this already.

Other interesting stuff

Magnetotactic bacteria

• Somewhere I read something about this 'magnetic' bacteria (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetotactic_bacteria) - maybe this can be used for orientation/movement. This organism is already successfully used to produce electrical energy.
• Filippo Menolascina 12:30, 26 May 2008 (EDT): Bastiaan's idea seems very interesting...we could apply time-varying magnetic field stimulation to make bacteria move, or "dance"! We could even think at some form of magneto-activated memory if MTB orientation can be selectively modified (something like the mechanism computer hard drives work on). Bastiaan, do you know anything about the issues in cloning the genes involved in biomineralisation stated in the wikipage you pointed out? (Bastiaan: No, not really)

Printing

• Marco JL de Groot While reading through some of the previous iGEM projects I was intrigued by the idea of Calgary 2007. The used lysis of agar to produce a high resolution picture on agar plates by bacteria. If we could have bacteria produce a stain/pigment/dye or solid compound (like crosslinking/polimerising it's surrounding) in a 3D agar block we could print a 3 dimensional picture or even a solid item. We would need to excite these bacteria then with a number of different stimuli, like 3 lasers to mark the position of production.
• Annother extension of this concept could be to make bacteria produce a pigment and a crosslinking to cotton fiber for high resolution fabric printing. One would spray/spread the bacteria on a T-shirt, exite them using a laser light or metabolite, they produce a pigment and an enzyme (or enzyme system) to crosslink the pigment to the cotton. Just washing once would remove the bacteria (or inactivate them by initiation of a self destruct/DNA-ase after they are done). This may reduce the environmental load of staining fabrics, as we would not use harsh chemicals to raise pH need high temperatures for the crosslinking.

Sticky bacteria

• Bastiaan I found this news item on the internet about a sticky bacteria [1]. It is about the Caulobacter crescentus and it is said to be "nature's strongest-known glue to stay in place on wet surfaces". Any interesting applications using stickiness?

Others

• In many project GFP is used to inform us about the transcription of a certain protein. FRET also uses fluorescent proteins, but they are used to inform us about the binding of proteins. Maybe this can also be used as an alternative output of a system.

Favourite projects

Filippo Menolascina

• University of Bologna 2007
• TIGEM - University of Naples 2007
• University of Tsinghua 2007

Domenico Bellomo

• University of Bologna 2007
• University of Edinburgh 2007
• TIGEM - University of Naples 2007

Bastiaan

• Alberta 2007
• Ljubljana 2007
• Davidson Missouri 2007

Emrah

• ETH-Zurich 2007
• Taipei 2007
• Turkey 2007

Farzad Ehtemam

• Imperial College 2007