Difference between revisions of "Team:UCL/Demonstrate"
| Line 72: | Line 72: | ||
<PHOTO OF LUBRICANT> | <PHOTO OF LUBRICANT> | ||
| + | |||
| + | |||
| + | |||
| + | Our functionality for our GMO lubricant would be two fold. | ||
| + | |||
| + | Initially we envisaged an STI-detecting lubricant which would change colour when in contact with an organism such as syphilis and chlamydia trachomatis. | ||
| + | <br> | ||
| + | When talking about ageing most of the diseases and implications that come to mind are quite obvious: loss of sight, hearing or mental capacity, arthritis and | ||
| + | many more. One that doesn’t come to mind very often are Sexually Transmitted Infections, such as chlamydia, syphilis and gonorrhoea. The fact of the matter is that between 2007 and 2011 the number of chlamydia and syphilis increased by 31%and respectively 52% in the American population over the age of 65. 1This may initially come as a surprise but it is a reality nowadays, especially in elderly care facilities. With people living for longer, medication countering the effects of erectile dysfunction and a lot of free time it can be crudely compared to an American frat house. This might not yet be seen as a problem as people of all ages should be able to enjoy themselves however they want to. Yet the real problems start when there are secondary effects from the STIs, such as arthritis, vision loss and other symptoms. Those will usually be classified as just age-related problems and treated as such, rather than being treated appropriately. | ||
<br> | <br> | ||
<br> | <br> | ||
Revision as of 16:44, 19 October 2016
<!DOCTYPE html>
DEMONSTRATE
----
OVERVIEW
Talking to Aubrey de Grey and Filipe has stressed the need for us to be able to explore through not just conceptional design but through wet lab, how we can prove that our ideas will work in the real world, in the complex human body. Real world conditions to us is defined as the human body. How will our biobricks interact under real conditions? Will our biobrick survive in the human body? Will they interact or affect other processes in the body? How can we then ensure that the result of this exploration can feed back onto the design of our devices to make them safer and more controlled.
IrrE biobrick for lubricant
IrrE
This construct already exists in the registry, however, we wanted to expand the pre-existing functionality. Here we have shown that this gene goes beyond helping growth in high salt concentration solutions by demonstrating that it actually exists bacterial growth in lubricant.
To achieve this we used lubricant from the market, specifically, Superdrug to demonstrate this in order to prove the gene would be functional in real-world conditions.
Our results indicate our proof of concept that under simulated conditions to be a success. This is because E. coli transformed with IrrE had improved growth in LB and lubricant compared to wild type.
We believe this is the first step to demonstrate that a living organism would be capable of living in lubricant.
Our functionality for our GMO lubricant would be two fold.
Initially we envisaged an STI-detecting lubricant which would change colour when in contact with an organism such as syphilis and chlamydia trachomatis.
When talking about ageing most of the diseases and implications that come to mind are quite obvious: loss of sight, hearing or mental capacity, arthritis and
many more. One that doesn’t come to mind very often are Sexually Transmitted Infections, such as chlamydia, syphilis and gonorrhoea. The fact of the matter is that between 2007 and 2011 the number of chlamydia and syphilis increased by 31%and respectively 52% in the American population over the age of 65. 1This may initially come as a surprise but it is a reality nowadays, especially in elderly care facilities. With people living for longer, medication countering the effects of erectile dysfunction and a lot of free time it can be crudely compared to an American frat house. This might not yet be seen as a problem as people of all ages should be able to enjoy themselves however they want to. Yet the real problems start when there are secondary effects from the STIs, such as arthritis, vision loss and other symptoms. Those will usually be classified as just age-related problems and treated as such, rather than being treated appropriately.
When talking about ageing most of the diseases and implications that come to mind are quite obvious: loss of sight, hearing or mental capacity, arthritis and many more. One that doesn’t come to mind very often are Sexually Transmitted Infections, such as chlamydia, syphilis and gonorrhoea. The fact of the matter is that between 2007 and 2011 the number of chlamydia and syphilis increased by 31%and respectively 52% in the American population over the age of 65. 1This may initially come as a surprise but it is a reality nowadays, especially in elderly care facilities. With people living for longer, medication countering the effects of erectile dysfunction and a lot of free time it can be crudely compared to an American frat house. This might not yet be seen as a problem as people of all ages should be able to enjoy themselves however they want to. Yet the real problems start when there are secondary effects from the STIs, such as arthritis, vision loss and other symptoms. Those will usually be classified as just age-related problems and treated as such, rather than being treated appropriately.
