Team:ZJU-China/Notebook/Brainstorm

Brainstorm

New Application

1. Create a kind of GMO which can fix the nitrogen in the air, and make it into a microbiological reactor applied in the industry of nitrogen-fixation.
2. Produce a type of biosensor that can detect the concentration of a certain substance, the intensity of light or any other things that come to your mind, by using current as a quantified output and pigments as a qualified indicator.
3. Make a breakthrough in the synthesis of biogenic magnetism by constructing the magnetic bacteria. Based on previous success of magnetic bacteria constructing, we want to make a sought of yeast Saccaromyces cerevisiae magnetic by culturing them in the ferric citrate.

Food/Energy

1. Improve the effiency of the utility of lignocellulose. As the cellulase is compound enzyme, we plan to screen different kind of combination of cellulase in various bacteria and funguses to find the most efficient one. We also want to use the existing yeast’s metabolic pathway to break down the metabolin of lignocellulose(glucose) directly into ethanol. To be more effective, we build a mechanism to pretreat the lignocellulose to destroy its crystalized structure and the lignin around the cellulose.
2. We are to design a process to decompose glucose and extract 2,3-butanediol via electron transfer. The idea is based on the theory of MFCs (Microbial Fuel Cells), a mature technology. We choose G. sulfurreducens, one kind of Geobacter that has either the ability to absorb electrons from electrodes (classified as Electrotrophs) or to donate electrons (classified as Exoelectrogens). Exoelectrogens are attached to the anode to provide free electrons via decomposing glucose that is from cellulose, and Electrotrophs are on the cathode to directly use electrons and CO2 as raw stock in electrosynthesis to produce 2,3-butanediol.
3. Enginner the lactobacillus to make it survive better and produce different flavors. It is better to find a way to enable it to combine with different flavor receptors thus artificial food additives can be reduced or replaced.

Foundational Advance

1. Use CRISPR(Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats RNA) technique to find out the trashy genes and construct the minimal genome.

Health/Medicine

1. Escherichia coli is commonly found in the lower intestine of human and most E. coli strains are harmless, so it is an ideal carrier of detector and medicine which used to colon cancer.
2. Ovarian tumor is characterized by increased level of serum mesothelin . Malignant ovarian tumor has higher lever of IL-6 compared with benign type . We construct chimeras by fusing mesothelin antibody and IL-6 receptor with membrane-bound transcriptional activator ToxR and MetR. Then we couple these two constructs to AND logic gate and hopefully this biosensor system will help us distinguish ovarian tumor, benign type and malignant type.
3. This idea is based on the principle that insulin can inhibit the activity of HSL and ATGL in adipose tissue at terminal stages of cancer, which will remarkably inverse the loss of destructive adipose and muscle tissue and subsequently reduce the symptoms of cachexia and prolong the lifespan of cancer patients.
4. Pesticide use has proven to be a valuable tool in combating disease vectors that spread illness to millions of children and adults each year, however excess pesticide can cause immense damage to local ecosystems and human body. Our team want to develop and characterized a cheap, versatile pesticide sensor based on an E.coli chassis. It expresses fluorescent signals to show the concentration of pesticide residues in food to avoid food poisoning happens.
5. Structure a capsule which could monitor, feedback and suppress a sort of disease (like colon cancer). The capsule will be implanted in vivo, and attach to organ or tissue using the locating device.The engineered bacterium in the capsule have receptor in the cytomembrane, which would bind the signaling molecule produced by the disease, then activate the signal transduction pathway in the engineered bacterium.

Environment

1. Use the means of synthetic biology and the response of microorganism to the to design the biological sensor to monitoring those air pollutants. Use microorganism to absorb some pollutants in the air to achieve the purpose of purifying air.

Information Processing

1. The traveling salesman problem (TSP) is a classical NP-complete problem in graph theory .Our project is inspired from the genetic algorithm, which is an important kind of algorithm in theoretical computer science to solve TSP problem.