We have decided on a project manipulating bacterial chemotaxis. What is chemotaxis? Well, it's the ability of bacteria to swim towards something they're attracted to and swim away from chemicals that are potentially dangerous to them. We will be engineering bacteria to be attracted to a substance, reach the source of that substance and once they are there, turn off their attraction to this substance and become attracted to another substance. This means we can send a bacteria out to detect something. Once it's found its highest concentration, it will swim back to the start to report back. This project has potential applications in mining, medicine and water treatment!
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The CSIR Wits South Africa team consists of six enthusiastic undergraduate students
each having their own area of expertise. Four of the members are studying science
and two are studying engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand. The biologists
are from the schools of Molecular and Cell Biology and Molecular Medicine and Hematology.
The team has two engineering students, one studying information engineering and
the other, chemical engineering. This team is a dynamic one where each team member
has something unique to offer to the competition.
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We created the following software during the competition.
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