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Revision as of 11:30, 1 September 2011
Project Overview
Biofilms truly are ubiquitous in the natural world. They are significant both industrially, coating pipes and bio-reactors making them difficult to clean, and medically, forming invisible films of bacteria on catheters causing the spread of hospital born infections like MRSA. Biofilms are communities of microbes that form complex 3D structures by excreting a mixture of polysaccharides and DNA. If biofilm growth or dispersal could be controlled spatially and temporally then it might be possible to create tiny 3D shapes and patterns in a process that could be called bio-photo-lithography. Light dependant promoters may allow for the level precision gene regulation required to create such structures, which may have applications as scaffolds for tissue engineering, pharmaceutical creation and packaging, or even to create the tiny geometric structures and channels required for microfluidics.
System Design
The system we have designed for iGEM 2011 takes advantage of the modular nature of synthetic biology and combines relatively few parts to create a complex and highly regulated system of gene expression. This diagram shows how the biobricks we intent to create can be organised to allow for the bio-photo-lithography process. Highlighting the devices will display the biobrick constructs we have design to perform the device functions.
