Difference between revisions of "Team:Nanjing-China"

Solar energy is the most abundant energy form on earth, but is hard to use.

To transfer light to allow sustainable production of chemicals motivates the development of artificial photosynthetic systems. The two key elements in this system are the electron transport media and enzymes to harvest excited electrons. The current transportation method either requires expensive semiconductor nanoparticles or special species inconvenient for gene operation. In which way can we make a new system with an easier as well as cheaper method?

What’s more, for downstream enzymes that harvest electrons, including hydrogenase and nitrogenase, we found that they are generally oxygen intolerant. So we also want to build an oxygen-isolation system.

This year we managed to solve this problem once forever in synthetic biology. Our project proposes a new method to construct an artificial photosynthetic system in model organism E.coli with the help of metal-binding protein and surface display machinery.

In addition, using silicon encapsulation and charge effect, we have the ability to overcome oxygen intolerance with assist from polymer materials. With this clever strategy, we achieve in air hydrogen production using E.coli hydrogenase 1 in normal condition.

This new light-driven system is of general applications which can also extend to more species including yeast and bacillus. So do the encapsulation system!

* Put your mouse on those cards to see what will happen