Tuesday 20 May 2008

Finalising ideas

• Bacteria detecting or emitting sound:
  • Gonna be a breakthrough if we succeed.
  • However, we cannot find any information about a particular bacterial gene, or at least a particular bacterium that can respond to sound.
• Nguyen Xuan Hung: Simulation of fundamental biological interactions of ecosystem using bacteria.
  • We can start off with simple interactions between 2 species (predation,mutualism,competition...). From that, we can extend our system by building more complex tri-species interactions (sth like: the enemy of my enemy is my friend).
  • The constructs and modeling tasks seem doable.
  • Difficulty: hard to maintain sufficient environment for such system (as faced by Imperial College 06 team)
• Bacteriocin:
  • Choon Kit: E-coli O157:H7 is among the most dangerous strains of E-coli. Remarkably, the use of antibiotic may provoke its virulence. Some types of bacteriocin can kill them.
  • Colicin E7 is the bacteriocin that can kill most of O157:H7 substrains.