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Team:IPN-UNAM-Mexico/Future
From 2009.igem.org
And here we go!
About the project
Time ago, many ancient cultures were aware that nature has the answers for almost every question and problem they had, and they were not wrong, now, in this new era of new and advanced disciplines, the same applies, again we return to the roots and we believe its time to turn back to nature to get new answers and new questions and put them in the hands of mankind for wellness.
Of course is not so easy, while manking has only 100 years working on genetics, life has more than 4.5 billion years doing this, so there are billions of years of answers that we can take for us.
One of this answers that we were looking for was working on a biosensor and finding the way to do a coupling between bioremediation - biosensors - energy harvesting, something that actually happens in almost any place in the world thanks to the simbiosis between organisms.
This artificial - symbiosis is still far from our work, but looking at nature and finding "non-conventional" metabolisms (we call them "non-conventional" for the biology for humans, actually, thinking about biomass the oxygen - based metabolisms are the most exotic and non-conventional), isolate the pieces and try to make it functional to the lab.
Starting this year, we did the first collect of bacteria, after 15 days doing experiments we found a Vibrio spp. that produces light, this kind of bacterias are well known because they produce light, and it´s metabolisms are characterized and some pieces of its genome are sequenced, at this time we have complements of sequences that has some interesting properties and we hope to get them working soon.
Since many years ago, many people were aware of the phenomena that happens in nature, and actually we didnt explore them in deep, some, like the GFP proteins are still a hit on molecular biology, but now we are starting to running out options, we need to explore now and search the possibilities to get some answers again.
More!!!
Some pictures about fieldwork.
