From 2007.igem.org

Projects

We submitted a formal abstract a few months ago, but to keep this short and sweet this year's Duke GEM team is essentially interested in tackling problems associated with engineering bacterial systems to be easily controllable by clean, macroscopic inputs in order to create useful, macroscopic products. In the course of our brainstorming, we started to become slightly obsessed with the idea. We wanted to make bacteria you could shock or heat or light up into submission. Not stopping there, we wanted bacteria which would make their own voltage and bacteria that could shine their own light, and then after they've communicated and worked, we wanted bacteria which could give us an exact and complicated product. Of course we broke this down into several smaller goals.

Here are our projects for the summer:

• Electric field-activated transcription factor
• Bacterial communication with light
• Synthesis and property-control of bioplastics
• Bacterial solar fuel cell

Furthermore, as a team we were not opposed to the recombination of Sheldon Williams' and Alison Bales' DNA to clone a race of super- power forwards, but lacked the 6'-10" cloning chambers we'd need for the project. And of course, there's always this idea, but we watched 'The Fly' again and decided against it.