Brainstorming!!!!

Post all of your ideas here! Just a temporary place to share ideas before we get a forum or something else... and maybe also your name, so we know who thought of what if we want to discuss something.

1) Bacteria that could be "integrated" (symbiose?) into plants/vegetables/... to enrich them in nutrients? (Gabriela)

2) Bacteria as a diagnostics tool for still uncurable diseases: sensor for a molecule/hormone/... specific of a disease, and would then release a substance which could create a visible phenotype: could allow early detection of diseases (ideally) (Gabriela)

3) Bacteria for the food-processing industry: they could produce some kind of flavouring substance/vitamin/nutrient which is normally added artificially to a mixture (e.g. a juice...), and could be tuned to produce the substance until the optimal dosage is reached? --> more an industry application (Gabriela)

4) Sound-sensing bacteria: don't know if it's possible or if a native receptor could be "tweaked" for this, but could be useful if we could use sound waves as a triggering signal for e.g. substance release --> going to try to do some research (Gabriela)

5) Bacteria that could bind to a surface making a biofilm and fonctionalize the surface. To make the surface hydrophilic/hydrophobic or change the viscosity of this surface (e.g. with the movement of their flagella..) (Christian)

6) Use bacteria, like magnetotactic bacteria which produce nanoparticle (Fe3O4 or Fe3S4), to produce another nanoparticle. Or use this bacteria to purify liquid of different toxic metal. Here you have a link to : Biogenic nanoparticles: production, characterization, and application of bacterial magnetosomes (Christian)

7) Found a pretty cool thing (though it's from 2002 so a bit old): at MIT they covalently linked a little gold "antenna" to enzymes or DNA, and when they stimulated the bacteria with an electromagnetic field, this disrupted the structure of the protein/DNA the antenna was attached to (because it harvested the energy of the field) so that for example the enzyme wouldn't function anymore (the effect is reversible). Couldn't find the whole article for free but here's a short summary: MIT Researchers Merge Electronics with Biology (Gabriela)

also: apparently there's some evidence that bacteria do somehow emit electromagnetic/sound waves to stimulate growth? but I haven't found much on the subject yet

8)Create a biosensor for CO (carbon monoxyde), that would turn red or green if the threshold of toxic CO is reached. Use of dried E. coli cells and a GFP cassette : an inducible promoter sensitive to CO and then the GFP gene so that the E. coli cells would turn green if there is too much CO. This could be then detect and associated with some sort of an alarm. (Caroline)

9)Engineer cells so they could synthesize ozone (no idea if it is possible), and make them resistant to cold and to create a support for them. An application would be to send these cells in the ozone layer to recreate it. (Caroline)

10) An application in personal medicine : some treatements are efficient in patient with a certain allele while it has no effect (or an adverse response) in the patients with the other allele. An alternative to sequencing every patient would be to engineer some cells so they bind to the receptor of the drug, and would fluoresce only if not bound. Use of an inducible promoter to make the control (all cells fluoresce at the beginning and when we add the ligand no more fluorescence if it is bound). (Caroline)