Week 5
Wednesday, May 30
This day we got together because we wanted to decide which project we were going to do. We had had a lot of time to think and discuss the ideas we had been contemplating, as well as to think about the advantages and drawback of the two main chassis we wanted to work with, E. coli and Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. From the beginning it was clear that working in E. coli had a clear advantage; most of the work in previous years of the competition had been done in E. coli and there were lots of part we could play with. On the other hand, there was practically no work that had been done in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii and we saw both an advantage and a disadvantage; we took the latter as a challenge! The whole team was very keen on developing and characterizing new parts for a new chassis. Having decided that we were going to work in with Chlamy, at first we proposed to use it to create a biosensor which could monitor the accumulation of carbohydrates or lipids and give a color indication depending on whether it was accumulating one or the other.
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