6/2/15 - Over the weekend we intensively studied immunotherapy and its cancer related applications. We thought about trying to create an organism that would maybe aid in the production of T and B-cells.

6/2/15 - Decided that we didn’t have the proper resources to adequately test anything related to cancer research so we shifted gears. Some of us revisited the Celiac’s disease idea and tried finding a site in the recognition of gluten in an attempt to find a spot to repress the response. The rest then went back to the pH sensing system. We saw this competition as a driving force to construct more parts to expand the registry rather than to create a stand alone project, so creating a pH sensing system could prove useful in other applications.

5/16/15 - After more investigation we found that other pH sensors had been submitted to the Registry in the past but none were directly linked to transcription factors. So our focused turned to understanding nature’s way of sensing pH.

6/2/15 - Reconvened to discuss findings. Only a few potential candidates were found but none seemed realistic. We decided to table the idea and keep brainstorming and return to this idea if we were unable to come up with anything else.

6/2/15 - Entertained the idea of biofuel production. The team went an investigated potential molecules we would produce and the research that has already been done in this competition and out.

6/2/15 - Started thinking more big picture about the goals of the synthetic biology and what kind of problems it can realistically solve at this point in time. We thought about how it is that such small organisms can have larger effects on society. This idea of scaling up biology bot us thinking about bioreactors.

6/2/15 - Met up to discuss everyone’s findings. We found that the exact mechanism for this degradation is still not well understood as it requires the use of a cellulosome, which is a conglomerate of numerous large proteins that has yet to be fully visualized. Our hope was to try and take several pivotal proteins from the complex and insert them into a high expression vector to see if by increasing the production of these proteins, we could increase the cellulolytic activity of the organism being used in the bioreactor.

6/2/15 - Studied the actual workings of the fermentors at Anaerobe systems to see what problems were actually present. We found that the rate of activity of the organism was not the problem because they were using a cellulolytic Clostridium species, which has a doubling time of about 6 minutes. We did find, however, that their continuous culture system was unable to function for longer than three hours. We hypothesized this to be the result of the high acid concentration in the culture that accumulated over the time of the culture. In order to address this issue we decided to create a two part project: one side will sense low pH which would then induce the expression of the other side which is the regulating system that would be responsible for returning the intracellular pH to neutral.