Team:HKU-HKBU/brainstorming

=Brainstorming= The brainstorming for our team started at the beginning of June. All the team members racked their brain and we have come up with a heap of ingenous ideas during this process. We mainly focused on developing engineered bacteria that can help tackle some of the most troublesome problems our society faces and that can promote the human health.

The list of ideas generated during our brainstorming session go as follows.

Anti-mosquito bacteria
Bacteria that can ward off mosquitoes by releasing some 'anti-mosquito' chemicals and thus can be used to reduce malaria.

Bacteria radio
Bacteria conjugated with nanotubes that can sense the electromagnetic waves.

Bacteria chain
Bacteria connected at ends to form a chain so that their locomotion is synchronized.

Desalinating bacteria
Bacteria that can neutralize acidic soil by releasing ions.

Bacteria with toggle switch
Oscillating system that can emanate light with alternating wavelengths.

Bacteria calculator
Bacteria that contains molecular logic circuits that can count numbers.

Bacteria memory
Bacteria that utilize positive feedback to maintain input signals.

Methane-consuming bacteria
Bacteria that can survive in the stomachs of livestock and convert methane, which is a grennhouse gas, to other compounds with a higher boiling point.

Bactomotor
Our current project.

Bacteria signalling chain
Construct a chain of bacteria that are conjugated with each other at ends and use light as the signal. The signal is produced by luciferase and received by rhodopsin.

When we decide our final goals from a long list of ideas, we took into account the following considerations:


 * 1) The project has to be do-able within 3 months. We have to have some results to demonstrate on the Jamborree!
 * 2) The project has to have far-reaching implications for the future society.
 * 3) The project must sound interesting and attract viewer's attention.

We finally chose 'Bactomotor' as our final project. This project,as described in our wiki, can have great implications for our soceity in terms of energy utilization. Our Bactomotor can generage forces by metabolizing nutrition in its living environment with a high efficiency. The cost of obtaining clean mechanical energy is only a minuscule amount of glucose!

The brainstorming process is a valuable experience for our team. As everyone has to find sufficient evidence to support his own idea, we got a lot to read and we learned a lot!