Team:Edinburgh/biology(overalldescription)

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Personal note

Participating in the iGEM competition gives the opportunity to people to meet like-minded scientists around the world. The whole structure of the competition promotes the creation of a global scientific community, removing boundaries and making collaboration between different disciplines of science easier. Such a mentality is needed for tackling scientific issues of this era. Science has reached such a level where everyone has become so specialised, that sometimes the bigger picture is lost. Hopefully all of us can make a change for the future generations. Participating in iGEM inspired me in looking further into the beneficial prospects of synthetic biology and has motivated me to look further into this branch of science.
Vasilis

Our project is concerned with the detection of both TNT and nitrites/ nitrates. We have designed two distinct pathways, each detecting the relevant substances. Via signal integration, both pathways interact to give a different visual signals depending on the presence or absence of our target chemicals.

In this section, we present a simplified explanation of how our system operates from a practical point of view. The first aspect to point out is that we intend for the bacteria to be spread over affected areas with an aeroplane. The resulting colour pattern will be viewed at night. The visual outcome results are summarized in Table 1.















I am confused, what is the advantage of having two colours?

The colour pattern to be expected is quite simple- If you imagine TNT molecules diffusing away from their source of origin in all directions, you will realise that a pattern of concentric circles pinpointing the location of the landmine will be formed. As TNT is further away from the point of origin it becomes scarcer, and nitrites will predominate giving rise to a blue colour, whereas nearer the origin TNT will be in higher concentration giving rise to a yellow light. The predicted signal output in the presence of TNT is two concentric circles, blue on the outside, and yellow on the inside (Figure 1). If you would like more information on that, why don’t you check our modelling page?

Edinburgh University iGEM Team 2009