Edinburgh/Ideas
From 2007.igem.org
Current Ideas of Possible Projects
Contents |
Synthesis
Synthesis of chemotherapy drugs that are hard to produce in nature
- 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.
- cyclosporin
- rapamycin
Bioredimiation
Detection of Contaminants
Removal of Contaminants
Immobilisation of Heavy metals
conversion of uranium and other heavy metals to insoluble metal phosphates or reduced states, which can easily be separated out or immobilised in the ground.
There appears to be several groups researching this area at the moment, and several have published articles on the conversion.
Whist the immobilisation of heavy metals in the ground is good in terms of keeping them out of the water table, it will not help with uranium or any other radioactive substances.
Plants 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 feasibility of working with plants.
Safety Issues
We cant just release genetically manipulated organisms into the wild to help clean up the environment for a number of reasons. Possible things to consider:
Danger of mutation and effecting environment in adverse ways
Looking at Deinococcus radiodurans with multipe genomes to see if the resistance to rasiation
Danger of continuing to live after the job is done
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.
This system must be fail safe
