Team:Virginia/Project

The Project

Fundemental Project: Translating or otherwise implementing a metabolic pathway poses many problems. A major one is the need to tune the relative expression levels of the genes involved in the pathway. The goal is usually to optimize the flux of the components involved. We will be working on a tool which we hope will allow for a novel way perform these tuning operations.

Applied Project: As the world's fossil fuel supply starts to look ever more unstable it's time to think about the myriad uses that fossil fuels are put to besides creating fuel. Plastics are a ubiquitous manufacturing ingredient and are currently derived from fossil fuels. We will be investigating a biosynthetic way to produce plastics with a carbon source that does not originate from fossil fuels.