Team:ZJU-China/Notebook/Brainstorm

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Notebook | Brainstorm

Rainbofilm

Our project
Gut Flora

Health & Medicine
week3
week4
week5
week6

Rainbofilm

Biofilm has been our team’s long-standing interest. Though our motivation to study biofilm at first is on its effective elimination, a review paper on biofilm totally changed our view of it and led us into a new direction. When something as difficult to eliminate and natural as biofilm is, can we make use of it instead of destroying it? Following this strand of thought, we started to investigate the advantages brought by the advent of biofilm for the bacteria, such as its increased resistance to harsh conditions under which normal cells cannot survive. Another fascinating fact about biofilm is that cells are differentially expressed to form different layers within biofilm.
We continued to develop our project from two ideas based on the background. The first is based on biofilm’s differentiated expression. We hope to construct a three-layer stratified expression system within biofilm in response to oxygen concentration gradient. This could serve as a prototype for future construction simply by replacing the reporter gene with user’s target genes. The second idea stems from the biofilm’s strong resistance to bad growth conditions, such as when surrounded by high concentrations of heavy metal. We want to engineer and develop our biofilm into the second generation of biosensor. As a natural concentration gradient of heavy metal is formed along the depth of biofilm, with the same threshold for detection constructed in all the cells, the whole biofilm system would be able to detect different levels of the heavy metal concentration in its surrounding environment.

Monday

We believe engineering gut bacteria is a promising field in the future, for bacteria are easy to be engineered compared with engineering human cell, and human gut is naturally inhabited by many different bacteria. We could construct a gut bacteria kit for either supplying nutrients such as vitamins or synthesizing and delivering drugs. We’re highly motivated to do this project, for it offers a good solution to alleviate the current famine and diseases brought by malnutrition in many developing countries around the world. The drug delivery, adapted to host’s circadium rhythm and physiological state, would be an ideal approach to cure some chronic diseases. However, we didn’t choose to further develop Gut Flora Kit as our team’s project this year, because we have limited knowledge and experience in gut flora and intestinal environment.