A group of colleagues and I planning an attempt to elucidate some of the luciferin synthesis genes in our spare time. Much of the pathway is unknown at present, and there would be interesting applications given a complete understanding.
In the unlikely event that we manage to work out the entire system (which I doubt we can in our little free time), I can see us switching to a full time project trying to clone it into house plants or trees or something. I've got decent experience with agrobacterium and callus culture protocols, and we could use computational / systems biologic modelling to cut down the gene expression and regulation search space given some initial in vivo data.
Do you think we would be able to get private funding if we made headway? I haven't looked into that much, let alone biotech startups, but I would be very interested in starting one. It's unfortunately pretty costly work...
In the unlikely event that we manage to work out the entire system (which I doubt we can in our little free time), I can see us switching to a full time project trying to clone it into house plants or trees or something. I've got decent experience with agrobacterium and callus culture protocols, and we could use computational / systems biologic modelling to cut down the gene expression and regulation search space given some initial in vivo data.
Do you think we would be able to get private funding if we made headway? I haven't looked into that much, let alone biotech startups, but I would be very interested in starting one. It's unfortunately pretty costly work...