Edinburgh/Ideas

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Revision as of 11:46, 14 June 2007

Current Ideas of Possible Projects

Drug Synthesis

Alternative synthesis routs

Synthesis of 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.

• Immunosuppressants
  • cyclosporin
  • rapamycin

MRSA

MRSA is becoming a major health problem within our hospitals, with the number of deaths rising from 148 in 1993 to over 500 in 1999. There are several natural compounds that have been discovered, which lower the resistance of MRSA to antibiotics, enabling its irradication. Epicatechin gallate and totarol both inhibit the penicillin binding protein, and lower the resistance of MRSA to methicillin. Is it plausable to engineer bacteria, which synthesis and release these two molecules within air conditioning systems and other hard to clean areas?

Bioredimiation

There are many areas of the world with contaminated soils, such as Chile, which has problems with the heavy metals antimony, copper and arsenic.

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.

There are already several bioremediation tools available on the market to remove heavy metal contamination, but these do not have an output system to tell you whether they have done their job. One idea was to create plants that bioilluminesce to make the harvesting of plants which have adsorbed an acceptable level of heavy metals easier.

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.

Gathering of Micro-Organisms

Another idea was to create micro-organisms that aggregate together for easy removal, once they have adsorbed an acceptable level of heavy metals.

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 multiple genomes to see if the resistance to radiation can be applied to other organisms and reduce the chance of mutations occurring

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

Self flavouring yoghurt

Idea is to create lactobacilli or acidophillus which are capable of flavouring as well as producing yoghurt, to cut down on the number of steps required in yoghurt production. Could have a multitude of colours and flavours engineered into the bacteria, such as the traditional strawberry, chocolate and banana and the less common mint, jaffa cake and coffee.

• I don't fancy trying to fill out the risk assesment on tasting it though --Amar 07:33, 14 June 2007 (EDT)

Bacterial Blood

With the problems present with blood transfusions and blood shortages, would it be possible to produce bacterial blood? Would it be easiest to produce just type O blood type, which can be used by all recipients, or to create a full range of blood types. Also sterlie production of blood would reduce the risk of people contracting blood bourne diseases from unhealthy donors.