Update on Nanowires

Hello Experimenters,

My name is Barrett – If you haven’t heard from me yet, it’s because since day one I, along with everyone else on the team, have been working tirelessly to achieve our project’s dreams and make them your reality.

Today though, I break from wet-lab and modeling to announce with a heavy heart that within the scope of this year's iGEM competition, we have had to suspend work on nanowires. This is not a decision we make lightly but one that comes after months of struggling to synthesize the necessary genes for engineering our E. coli to express functional organic nanowires.

For those who don’t know, typically after an iGEM team identifies the genes they want to express in an organism, they will send an order out to a gene synthesizing company who will then translate some hundreds of electronic As, Ts, Cs, and Gs into usable genetic material. However, this year, despite multiple methods and attempts, unforeseen complexities in that translation process have prevented our supplier from filling our order.

While we are looking to continue developing our nanowire project in the future, at this point it is simply not feasible to expect that we can give this part of the project the care and attention to detail it needs before the iGEM conference.

As always, we at Purdue iGEM would like to extend a warm thank you to all of those who have supported us and want to assure you that we are still moving full-steam ahead towards eradicating algal blooms and securing phosphorus availability.

Sincerely,

Barrett