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From 2011.igem.org

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INTERESTING POINTS (◎): Hummm......you mentioned about......"Realizing the Concept of Avatar?"

Magnetotactic bacteria has long been regarded as an interesting group of species exhibiting magnetotaxis with their fascinating bacterial organelles, magnetosomes. Also, optogenetics, the recent revolution in neuroscientific methodologies, has caught our attentions intensively. An eagerness out of pure curiosity to combine and utilize these two stream of thoughts unexpectedly gave way to a truly revolutionary idea, the realization of the concept of Avatar.

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A GROUNDBREAKING NEWS(!): So we've decided to call it an......Opto-Magnetic Revolution

This year, NYMU-Taipei goes beyond the current realm of mainstream synthetic biology, developing a opto-magnetic probing platform on Magnetospirillum magneticum AMB-1 which functionally couples to channelrhodopsins (opsins that are ultra-rapidly reactive to light beams of certain wavelengths) to enable activation of neuronal circuitry in a totally wireless, spatially and temporarily accurate, minimally invasive, 3-dimensional multi-site stimulation enabling fasion.

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HOW CAN THAT EVER BE POSSIBLE (?): Basically, we focus on BRET and electromagnetic field oscillations......

In our project, we focus heavily on inducing BRET with electromagnetic field oscillations(BRET, Bioluminescence Resonance Energy Transfer) . In this line of thought, mms13, a transmembrane magnetite tight-binding protein on the magnetosome membrane of Magnetopirillum magneticum AMB-1 was chosen to serve as the linker between non-contact force and biological responses. Comformational wobbling of mms13 induced by magnetite movement under electromagnetic field oscillation is our primary hypothesis. Before testing on this hypothesis directly, we've designed [ several constructs] to prove several lemmas believed foundational to this theory. Computational modeling is also a gigantic part of our project, [ check out for more]!