From 2007.igem.org

Ideas so far

Uranium bioremediation/ biosensor Chirs F mentioned the need for a uranium biosensor earlier today. I had a look into this and discovered an article on a new sensitive uranium biosensor was published earlier this year, PNAS: A catalytic beacon sensor for uranium with parts-per-trillion sensitivity and millionfold selectivity, 104(7), p2056 (2007), which rules out the need for a biological uranium biosensor. However before this discovery, we had the idea of engineering a synthetic receptor (due to the lack of specific heavy metal binding proteins present in literature), based on the success one group had in altering the binding site of calmodulin to bind metals other than calcium. Environmental chemistry (2005) p133-143

Another idea was the decontamination of toxic waste produced by nuclear power plants, to reduce the storage volume required for toxic waste. There appears to be several groups researching this area at the moment, and several have published articles on the conversion of uranium and other heavy metals to insoluble metal phosphates or reduced states, which can easily be separated out.

A third idea was to remove uranium and other heavy metal contamination from soils surrounding nuclear power plants, industry and areas where nuclear weapons/ depleted uranium have been in use. This would involve engineering plants to uptake uranium from the soil, then being harvested and safely disposed - have not yet looked into this idea in much detail as we weren't sure of the feasiblity of working with plants.

Drug synthesis Kim mentioned taxol, an anticancer drug, which is extracted from the pacific yew tree or semisynthesised from european yew needle extracts, at a cost of $6000 per treatment. Other natural drugs that are expensive to produce include cyclosporin and rapamycin, which are used as immunosuppressants

Illegal Drugs Detection Biosensor that will detect the presence of illegal substances and their relative concentration in blood and other dubious samples.

Extremophile E. coli Generate an artificial plasmid, encoding proteins and enzymes to enable E. coli to survive under extreme conditions, such as high temperatures, extreme pH's or under pressure

An alternative take on this idea is to design a vector that will enable extremophiles to survive under 'normal' growth conditions to make them easier to work with in the laboratory. For example extremophiles such as Spirochaeta americana are extremally fragile when removed from their natural environment and cannot survive for long under laboratory conditions.

Programmed cell death One of the main problems with releasing GM organisms into the environment is their ability to persist and interbreed with non GM organisms of the same species. One idea was to generate E. coli which could only divide for a certain number of generations before dying, removing its self from the ecosystem.