Team:Groningen/Notebook

Starting up

In March we started with brainstorms once a week. During these metings we decided on a project. We had a lot of different ideas. In May we decided to focus on three of the ideas we had:

• Using flagellar rotation of Bacteria to make a pump of liquid inside a tube.
• Making E. coli have a memory of events, like light inputs.
• Make a cellular automata in E. coli and use it to make games or the game of life.

The first idea was hard to make in the 2 or 3 months we had. Here we needed to have bacteria attach to a surface and also have the same orientation in order to have the movement of liquid in the same direction. This topic would probably take us longer than 3 months, so we decided not to move on with it.

For the memory idea we wanted the E. coli insert a small piece of DNA into a plasmid after it got an input. There is a phage system which put an insert inside a certain code in the DNA. However the problem is that we need bacteria to have all just 1 insert at the same time. Moreover we wanted more than one input behind eachother and the bacteria getting inputs in the same order inside a plasmid. This last is probably really hard to obtain, and not possible in the amount of time we have.

The last idea, making a cellular automata seemed to be our best option, since we really like to make a system inside E. coli and have a nice object to model.

Making the system

The model