Last weekend, we both had a lot of time on our hands. Matt had finished his class for the Summer Term and neither of us had any assignments to do after work. So, we decided to start a project. Neither of us had done stop-motion before, but it is so fun to watch and people get really creative. Here is one of my favorites: Click here to watch. And another one: here. Anyway, Matt is the team captain for BYU's first iGEM team. iGEM is a student competition for synthetic biology. For the project, the team needs to create a team wiki (basically a website outlining all of their project details). Matt wanted to do something fun that would explain their project quickly and be fun to watch. So, our first stop-motion effort and Dr. Coli were born.
Matt's project is a really cool one. The idea came from trying to detect colon cancer using bacteria! The modified e-coli travels through the body and if two indicators are present (both "Reactive oxygen species" and increased temperature must be present for the detection to work), then the e-coli glows! How cool is that? All you have to do is shine UV light on your waste and no colonoscopy! At least, that's the idea, although don't install a UV light in your toilet just yet. The project is officially called E-colinoscopy. Clever, huh?
Since Matt is the only one of us qualified to map out his team's project, all the illustrations are his. The beautiful photography is my contribution. Let me say, it was harder than I thought it would be! Since we don't own a tripod, my arms got really tired. It took us over 2 hours to take all the pictures! Finally, we compiled the video in half an hour in iMovie. Isn't technology amazing? Matt and I are really stoked to find more stop-motion projects. A moving Christmas card, perhaps? The possibilities are endless!
Here is our humble offering to the animation world:
You guys are awesome. And you are smart too, a lot smarter than I am since I couldn't do a stop-motion film or explain whatever it was Matt was explaining. I get the over-all idea, which is totally awesome (I'm not that dumb) but all that Chemistry stuff... let's just say I became a Social Work major by choosing a major that did not require any chemistry. ;)
ReplyDeleteI don't understand the plasmid stuff much either, but we had a lot of fun putting this together!
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