Stanford-Brown 2016

The Stanford-Brown 2016 iGEM team is building biologically produced membranes and sensors for space exploration. Biologically produced materials have several advantages over traditional building materials; most significant for our purposes, they are light and self-replicating. These characteristics make biomaterials ideally suited for space exploration. One possible application for these materials would be a biosensing balloon, which could used in both terrestrial and extraterrestrial atmospheres to detect temperature and molecules of interest. Furthermore, biomembranes and biosensors have other applications both here on Earth and in space.