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Team:Cambridge-JIC
From 2014.igem.org
Project Description
Sensing is an essential aspect of engineering. We need information about the world to make intelligent efforts to manipulate it. Ideal sensors are reliable, accurate and unobtrusive. Plants as biosensors fulfil these requirements and have the further benefit of being inexpensive and self-reproducing.
Our aim is to use the primitive plant Marchantia Polymorpha as a flexible biosensor. The input, processing and output functionalities are parcelled into modules which are linked using metabolites and inducible promoters. The modules can easily be interchanged and added, allowing many devices to be constructed from the same library of components: plug and play.
Our vision is to produce input, processing and output plants which can be combined through Mendelian crossing. We want to make home plant biosensors accessible and fun to the public in the same way as the Arduino has popularized electronic hacking.
