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Team:Bielefeld-Germany/Project/Appoach
From 2011.igem.org
Contents |
Approach
From the idea to a crude plan
After finding all members for our team in January 2011 we began thinking about an idea for an iGEM project. We had many different ideas, from carbondioxide eating E. coli to a biosensor for dioxines. But in the beginning of February we noticed an [http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/0,1518,745019,00.html online article] about the ban of the endocrine disruptor bisphenol A in the European Union for the production of baby bottles. We thought: if it was possible to detect BPA at home using a test that everybody could use, all parents on this world would have one concern less. So we decided to build a BPA biosensor. To ensure an everyday applicability this biosensor should be cell-free, nontoxic and easy to use.
Concretizing the plans of our device
Talking about an approach for this cell-free biosensor, one of our team members said that it would be great to have a surface which could be functionalized, just like the team from Slovenia did 2010 with DNA - only in 2-D not 1-D. We wanted to go further in this direction and did literature research. This led us to a species of proteins that form periodic two-dimensional structures just on their own in a so called self-assembly - the crystalline bacterial surface layers, short: S-layers. These proteins became our system of choice: usable as a nanobiotechnological scaffold for a lot of different cell-free applications, providing S-layer BioBricks in an assembly standard for fusion proteins will allow future iGEM teams and synthetic biologists an easy arrangement of their nanobiotechnological systems of choice. Our idea of do it yourself nanobiotechnology was born.
