Team:Groningen/Template/MODULE/project/bandage/prototype

So far we have done a lot of experiments with acrylamide gels. We mainly wanted to proof that bacteria can survive extreme conditions and encapsulation in a gel. We realize it wouldn't be a perfect material for an end product, but for us it is an easy and quite cheap way of testing. There will be a lot of testing, this started with what percentage of acrylamide gave the best flexibility results for us, we started with using 10-15-20-25-30 % acrylamide. Here 30% and 25% were to sturdy and thick, the 20% seems to give the best results for us. It’s the right combination between sturdy and flexible. After this we've tried freeze drying the cells itself and checking whether these survive after they are rehydrated. Until now we’re not that certain about our results. After encapsulation in the gel our cells did show a lot of GFP. Unfortunately we haven’t seen a single cell divide inside the gel which of course is the best proof of a living cell. Another thing was checking if the cells can't leave the gel, this was checked by putting cells in the gel. These parts of gel were put in a GM17 medium overnight, and if there was growth inside the media the next morning the bacteria could come out. We've tried this with ruptured gel and healthy, we clearly saw that cells could come out more easy when it was ruptured.