Modeling

At this step of the wiki, the careful readers has certainly understand that the goal is to rise up ethical question by creating a agar lemon covered with bacteria - E.coli in practice. But, before start more investigation and experimentation there is a real need to ensure that our project is feasable. And that's why we thought that modeling is so much important in an iGEM project.

• Firstly, we wonder if bacteria could live and develop them-solves correctly in the agar media.

Actually, ultimatly we hope create our lemon with the help of 3D-printer wich would use a mix of melted agar media and bacteria solution. A first ingredient which is desirable is oxygen. That's why we decided to model the oxygen diffusion in an agar medium.

• Now that we know if bacteria could develop in agar or not a natural issue is to predict the bacterial growth

Without spoiling, we can just say that the previous model confirm the intution we could have : while oxygen couldn't easily go into the medium, the growth on the surface area is sufficiently more important than in the medium to neglect the first one. More precisly, our bacteria is colorfull and the surface will be whole covered before intern-colony have time to develop enought to be visible. Finaly, when we could hope observe intern-bacteria the surface-one have allready done an opaque layer. So, this part aims to predict the bacterial population growth on an ellipsoidal object - a fake lemon in practice - over time.

More precisely, we have te determine the initial proportion of bacteria threshold from which we are sure that the population will never extinct, if this threshold exists...!

In progress

Morever, we have tried to illustrate our work with figures which could be understood for themselves, without knowing the method to get it. We will just add one or two -for the warrior- star(s) to parts which need more mathematical background in order to don't disgust not-mathematical readers from mathematics.

Just click on the title of the part you are interest in !

Oxygen Diffusion

Eugène's abstract

Bacterial Growth

This part aims to predict the bacterial population growth on an ellipsoidal object - a fake lemon in practice - over time. We will here limit ourself to the study the overall growth, exprimed in concentration of bacteria.

Fusion Proteine

Arnaud's abstract

Odor

To synthesize the smell of lemon, we have to mainly produce a combination of Limonene, Geraniol and Pinene. We propose a study of the evolution of the concentration of each product over time by using the technique Michaelis-Menten.