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Our Project

iHKU team has obtained a bronze medal last year in iGEM 2008. We have engineered a strain of E.coli to make them move according to the population density. To review the project we did in last summer, please look at our wiki iHKU_iGEM2008.

This year’s project

Having teamed up with the Hong Kong Baptist University for this year’s competition, the additional labor force and wider scope of knowledge allow our team to take on two projects at the same time and they are described briefly below for the sake of simplicity.

Project Ⅰ: Bio-motor

Many of the non-invasive medications nowadays include uses of nanorobots which promise to an innovating technique for surgical instrumentation, diagnosis and drug delivery. However, many of them lack a reliable propulsion power source to operate and this critical crisis remains one of the biggest obstacles to the extensive use of nanorobots in medical treatment. Hence, our team has put forward a pioneering idea which we aim to create a Bio-motor that can be integrated into those nanorobots and provide them with consistent energy to conduct assigned work. The Bio-motor will be extremely valuable when comes to nano-sized robot-assisted surgery or any medical treatment that requires nanorobots for body inspection as they provide a non-invasive method. Meanwhile, another potential application of the bio-motor is to generate electricity, thus providing a promising alternative renewable energy sources to our increasing electricity-demanding world, especially to those developing countries.

Project Ⅱ: synthetic rumen methane-consuming bacteria

Global warming, as a matter of fact, is now a seemingly worsening global issue that affects everyone living on earth. Accordingly to recent researches, cattle herds are responsible for producing a fairly high percentage of methane which is one of the major and most damaging greenhouse gases to be released into our atmosphere. Hence, we have come up with an idea to help eradicate this issue with the help of synthetic biology. We now aim at genetically modifying a type of methane-consuming bacterium that lives in the rumen of ruminant animals to help reduce the methane emission by the ruminant herds.

Both of these projects aim to target some of the most alarming and concerning issues in the modern world. They both have tremendously profitable potential for biotechnological companies, hospital units as well as environmental corporations and etc. Besides, these fruitful findings can also act as some valuable stepping stone for us to develop further discoveries and even more sophisticated products in coming years.