Team:TU Eindhoven/Notebook
From 2014.igem.org
NOTEBOOK
Bacteria can be made undetectable to the immune system with the use of encapsulation. Hydrogels are suitable for this purpose. Hydrogels are water-absorbing (synthetic) polymers, and are therefore able to form a layer around the bacteria. Due the low reactivity of this hydrogel capsule towards the immune system and permeability to small essential molecules (for example nutrients and wastes). With the use of microfluidic techniques, the amount of bacterial cells per liquid droplet is relatively easy to control. In the produced microfluidic droplet, hydrogel formation can be induced. The result is a hydrogelation from the outside towards the core of the droplet, surrounding the entire group of bacteria. The problems with these current techniques are: inhomogeneous hydrogelation (due to gelation form the outside to the core), uncontrollable cell growth inside the encapsulation, thus incontrollable drug release, and non-degradable encapsulations. The conventional encapsulation technique is visualised in Figure 1.
Notebook
iGEM TU Eindhoven - Microencapsulation
On this page our progress is kept neatly in chronological order
January
January 28th
The first meeting.The members of the team have gotten to know each other and set up a plan to brain storm. We also looked into the possibilities for research in Eindhoven to determine a track for our project
February
February 12th
The subjects found in January's brainstorm session were researched by subgroups of our team. Then we presented the ideas to each other and we voted for the most promising ideas to take a closer look.February 24th
We assigned roles to all the members of the team. These roles included responsibilities for Human Recources, finances, sponsoring, health and safety, modeling, lab work, and public relations. The brainstorm ideas were reviewed again. And by means of a discussion we decided that our general idea would focus around the use of bacteria in the human body.March
April
May
June
July
July 7th - July 13th
Deze week hebben we ook hele leuke dingen gedaan.August
September
October