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Team:Dundee/Project/DetectionComparison
From 2013.igem.org
Detection Comparison
The current method for detecting toxic levels of microcystin is to take a sample of water from different regions of the site being investigated and then to carry out high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). This process currently takes approximately 24 hours, we hope to reduce this to a more suitable 1 hour.
Assuming the cyanobacteria undergo binary fission and growth is uninhibited we were able to determine how the problem increases over 24 hours in comparison to 1 hour detection.
where
- MC(T) is the number of microcystin at time t
- b0 is the initial number of algae
The ratio for time t=24:1 is 8.4million:1. To put this into perspective this is the same as the height of the empire state building compared with the length of 7 E.coli bacterium. This model therefore emphasises that the 1 hour detection period is much more efficient
