Team:Exeter/Notebook/July13
Monday, 13 July
We settled on a name and designed a logo! We explored a few options in regards to logo design and decided that rather than a colourful logo, a monochrome logo with green accents looked more professional and readable. We focused on making the colours not too high contrast so the logo text could be read by people with dyslexia or visual difficulties, and went for colours which could be easily differentiated by colour-blind people.
During our meeting we also came up with a list of factors to decide on for our project to work successfully:
- Viscosity of the hydrogel
- How the hydrogel induces bacterial production of calcium carbonate
- Composition of the hydrogel
- Whether the hydrogel is an environment our GM bacteria can live in
- Shape of the 3D printed coral backbone
- How we can prevent environmental contamination and the accidental release of GM bacteria into the ocean
- Concentration of bacteria
- How the hydrogel is removed from the coral backbone (is it dissolved in the sea? If so we need to ensure it doesn't include microplastics or other pollutants)
- Whether we should use a co-culture
- Which organism we should take the urease gene from and whether the gene will be expressed effectively in Bacillus subtilis/E. coli
- Genes for CARPs 1-4 exist on an operon. The CARPs are known to work together but the individual function of each CARP is not understood. We considered the possibility of characterising the CARPs and only using the ones we need as opposed to transforming all of them into our bacteria.
- Which carbonic anhydrase to use
- Whether to use bioremediase (similar function to carbonic anhydrase). This would introduce silica into the printed structure.
Science Communication and Outreach
We posted an infographic about Exeter's past iGEM projects.
Hydrogels and Modelling
Last week, Velizar travelled to Bulgaria to visit family. Today he met up in person with Oliver and Stefan on the UCL team who were also in Bulgaria, to discuss how we could collaborate better on the flux balance analysis and biological modelling.