Goldilocks and the Three Ideas

Between iGEM and 20.020, I am beginning to feel a little like Goldilocks.  I am also feeling that a love of reading is a necessity. To put it more accurately, a love of skimming. Over the past few weeks, I have read what feels like countless papers. Coming up with ideas for a synthetic biology project sounds like it relies on creativity and knowledge of biology.  Although both those aspects are necessary, so are Google and PubMed and Google Scholar and many other databases full of scientific papers as we need to have a better understanding of what genes have been sequenced and what types of proteins and cell actions can help us accomplish our project's goal. Although I have just started this process for 20.020, iGEM has at least partially prepared me for the search for papers pertaining to our cancer detection project that are to come. Bring on the abstracts, fancy graphs, and really long names of proteins that I cannot pronounce! (Speaking of things I cannot pronounce, we has our presentations on Wednesday and, despite practicing, I still messed up pronouncing the names of a few proteins. That really frustrated me because I really did not want to let down the people on our team.)
Now all these papers are what make me feel like Goldilocks.  When creating a synthetic biology project, you have to find the project that is just right. If there has been a lot of research done on the topic, other labs are probably working on the project. If there has not been enough research done, that might be because the project is not feasible, profitable, or there is just not enough known about the causes or treatment of the issue for a synthetic biology approach to be taken yet. (In iGEM, all four of our groups have had panic moments when reading papers that began to reveal both ends of the spectrum.)  When we decided on our three ideas, we dealt with this issue.  The biological sunscreen was really cool, but it might not work because people would be hesitant to use viruses to change there cells.  Rapid wound sealing would be a really interesting project, but we are not really sure how we could put something to clot blood in the blood without causing clots and there had not really been enough research done yet about the techniques we were investigating.  Luckily, the cancer detection and treatment idea was novel and exciting.  Regardless, we are still working on modifying the idea as we discover what is actually possible (like do we really know exactly how to tell which cells are cancer cells) and what may have already been done (like tagging them with something like GFP).  Regardless, I think playing the role of Goldilocks and reading all these papers is worth it as we come closer to developing a focused project.