Team:TU Munchen

Welcome to the team wiki for Technische Universität München! Our team mailing list is tum-igem at googlegroups dot com.

Project Description


Our team was first interested in using E. coli for bioremediation. The goal was to engineer a strain that detects concentration gradients of (say) a metal product, swims towards it, and then absorbs that product. This was to occur by having E. coli secrete siderophores that bind to the product and then transport it into the periplasm. Some of these siderophores would be transported into the cytoplasm, in which a system of riboswitches would bias chemotaxis in the direction of the product. Please see the figure to the right for an overview of the system.

Unfortunately, this idea was beyond the experimental capabilities of our team, so we are now exploring some other ideas. We might implement a majority function by using some of the past designs for cellular logic gates. We are also thinking about using a colony of bacteria as data storage by flipping a genetic switch with an environmental signal. More details will be available soon.

Things That We Need To Do

 * Think of ideas. Add these to our ideas section.
 * Raise money. How much do we need? What companies should we approach? This should be written in our fundraising section.
 * Make improvements to our wiki.
 * Perhaps we can write to "Süddeutsche Zeitung" to make a short report about the competition and our project. And in this article, we can call for sponsors.