Team:Korea U Seoul/HP/Silver
Prehension
Domestic Industry: SWEET 2016
Korea_U_Seoul has utilized synthetic biology to carry out a project that develops a new environment-friendly energy source by combining microbial fuel cells and enzyme fuel cells. The project of Korea_U_Seoul is meaningful in that it uses agar, which has not received much attention as an energy source before, to generate electricity.
However, due to the lack of interest and thus lack of investment in synthetic biology within Korea, there have been difficulties in conducting researches. Publicizing was necessary in order to solve the lack of awareness of the general public in the field of synthetic biology. In light of this, Korea_U_Seoul had thought of the idea to set up booth in exhibitions and events related to environment-friendly energy to grab the attention of the general public.
SWEET has contributed to the growth and development of the new renewable energy industry since 2006 and this year, being the 11th event of its kind, was held in a large scale. We believed that this exhibition would be a good promotional opportunity for Korea_U_Seoul as it is conducting research on environment-friendly energy. We had also anticipated on obtaining good ideas from the results of other research teams to enhance our project. Fortunately, after making multiple contact with SWEET personnel, we were able to receive support from SWEET and participate in the communicative sessions among companies and academia of the field. Heavy responsibility was required to participate as an exhibitor, not just as a spectator. Our team members worked together for two months to prepare for our booth in this exhibition.
After multiple meetings with team members, we were able to select the specific contents of our booth. On the basis of this, we designed a poster and made brochure and video to introduce our team and our project.
Much effort was poured starting from setting up at the first day until the last day of putting it down. Despite this, none of us felt exhausted in any way because we were able to achieve above and beyond what we had aimed from participating in SWEET. With this persistent preparation, we participated with the anticipation of not only publicizing synthetic biology but also obtaining insight from other teams to solve the problems of our project.
SWEET 2016: Donghwan's View
It was a delighting story that the SWEET 2016, Solar, Wind & Earth Energy Trade Fair, is going to be held in Gwangju, Republic of Korea. Since the fair’s purpose coincides with our project which is highly related to global warming issues and energy problems, we decided to actively participate in SWEET 2016, expecting lots of knowledges and experiences.
The Fair was very huge as expected, associated with participants with various companies and even local governments. It was interesting that promotions held during fair actually ended up with numerous contracts between consumers and enterprises.
As mentioned in our team’s other wiki pages, the goal of Gelectricell is to make an ‘Agar utilizing dual core EMFC’, realizing the new concept of fuel cell that is a combination of EFC and MFC through synthetic biology. Since synthetic approach can make inexhaustible results in industrial area, and among them, MFC/EFC is the most widely used techniques dealing with waste disposal, we thought that facing MFC/EFC related businesses would give inspiration to our projects. However, we couldn’t find any promotions covering this area, since most companies were introducing techniques related to solar power and sunlight generations.
One of the most remarkable point was the company which showed the electric power producing technology using microorganism for carcass decomposition and firing residential wastes. It was the most unique and interesting promotion all around the fair. On the other hand, however, we wondered how they will manage the carbon emission quantity, which is one of the key requisites for highly efficient renewable energy.
Meanwhile, many local governments were introducing their regional projects. The seaside towns were planning to make islands that have energy independence through various renewable energy, more than just solar energy. The concept itself was interesting, and seemed to bring lots of advantages including not only the energy independency but also tourist industry. However, the proper project explanation was not available at the fair, and there were only concepts but nothing. Budget plans, or even eligible island list wasn’t there, which made us so disappointing.
What we felt participating this fair was that our country, South Korea, has very small sized industry and market of MFC/EFC. Only few companies research and sell these techniques, and even the government hasn’t recognized the importance of biological fuel cell technology in the global market. Currently, Korea’s renewable energy market is too concentrated on utilizing sunlight and solar power, which we thought was a problem. The question was: what about other energy fields? How much are they progressing and how about their achievements?
After the fair, we examined the statistical data on domestic renewable energy investigated by Korea Energy Agency, to find out the overall present condition of Korea’s renewable energy. Korea’s renewable energy business was started in 2005. At the initial stage, water generation and waste processing took most possession of the business. Until 2013, waste processing department was the major business among many energy fields.
However, in 2014, the sunlight generation business arose sharply, taking number one position with taking more than half of the rate in the number of employee. The biotech and fuel cell department wasn’t a big issue, on the contrary, the scale of investigation was low, too; they ranked 3rd (fuel cell) and 5th (biotech).
Studying the business of Korea’s renewable energy after participating SWEET 2016, we thought that Korea’s energy business has a long way to go. Although many biological laboratories are conducting research, it takes time to apply in industries, and investment shortage problem also exists. Therefore, the fixation of the lopsided investing condition is first needed.
The fundamental problem of the energy business is that the government isn’t recognizing the potential of biotechnology and synthetic biology. This leads to the shrinkage of monetary support in biotechnology, biofuel and symthetic biology from government. Attending SWEET 2016, we could meet people who gave us positive feedbacks about our project, but we could also notice how unfamiliar most of them feel about synthetic biology.
SWEET 2016: Sohyun's View
SWEET 2016 is one of the leading international fair as well as the biggest business opportunity in Korea for information exchange and networking on new renewable energy. It was hosted in "Gwangju", the hub of energy valley.
As the fair was international exhibition for interchange among domestic and international buyers and members, we, Korea_U_Seoul team could communicate with many companies, visitors and researchers working in various fields.
Also, we could recognize that diverse people among all age groups were actively focusing on the importance of new renewable energy and was interested in it, because of their participation on exhibits, student invention contest and various academic events.
There were 157 booths from diverse fields of new renewable energy. However, we couldn’t find the booth presenting the project applying EMFC technique as expected.
At SWEET 2016, we, Korea_U_Seoul team made up a booth about this year’s iGEM project, GelectriCell.
Our project GelectriCell’s final goal is to make practical and eco-friendly biofuel battery using agar as an energy source, processed by an algae named Gelidiumamansii (Lamouroux) Lamouroux. It is to let microbe to degrade agar which were not used for energy source before. Also, we focused on constructing eco-friendly battery by making microbe to catalyze by-products of degrading pathway, so that no leaving materials appear from biochemical energy producing step.
The reason that our project is suitable for Korea’s environment is that Korea is located in peninsula with 3 shore line and has limited scale of farmland. Especially, Korea has leading infrastructure ranking fourth place in algae culture technique and production, and therefore is advantageous in research based on algae biomass.
Besides, algae are eco-friendly organism which can recover environment while not commonly used for food resource, and has higher production yield per area compared to land biomass. For these reasons, it is worth to focus on bioenergy production and high-value substance production techniques using algae as energy source. Large amount of algae are distributed and captured throughout Korean peninsula, nevertheless, its merit is currently undervalued. Yet, nowadays, social atmosphere valuing businesses using algae is starting to be formed.
Although algae are not mainly a food resource, but still it’s portion of being edibly processed is big, therefore we started to focus more on agar. If we success in degrading agar which is both easily found at the natural surface of a sea and in laboratory environments, it can prove us the possibility of finding another algae as an energy source, so we tried to keep that in view when designing our experiment.
There were plenty of companies dealing with new renewable energy, but booths covering EMFC was out of existence, despite the beneficence of reducing the pollutant by skipping steps of converting biomass to biofuel while generating electricity, as well as booths using microbes to generate energy were merely found. Moreover, we could realize that new renewable energy industry didn’t even had any sense and interest about microbial bioprocessing, which is one of the main component of synthetic biology.
Additionally, many people who visited our booth had questions about how our project is possible. Nevertheless, there were brief explanation on poster for people who don’t know about synthetic biology at all, and they asked us about what synthetic biology is. Each time, we re-explained about the concept of synthetic biology with hope that more people being interested in synthetic biology. After our explanation, most of them couldn’t repress their astonishment.
We, one of pioneers in this field, are willing to develop technique not only ones having agar as an energy source but also ones using many other algae and microbes to generate energy.
A director of Maritime&fisheries Science Museum who visited our booth during fair and the president of Korea research council of Maritime Education who met at another event after the fair were both very eager to advise our project and also reacted affirmatively about the concept of “GeletriCell”. In particular, the director of Maritime&fisheries Science Museum said “Project GelectriCell is very new and persuasive suggestion for directed value-giving to our nation’s algae industry. Also, I wish the ecofriendly-energy-generation-industry using algae as an energy source to be extended and thrived. This project is very creative and I can confidently say that if your project is actualized, it must be beneficial to our country, Korea.” Also he validated that the field of our project is future-oriented and have enough potential for growth. In this manner, we could recognize that battery industry which utilize microbe and algae to make energy is blue-ocean field, unlike nearly saturated solar energy industry.
We commanded attention and got positive feedbacks form students, citizens, researchers and energy workers who visited SWEET. More surprisingly, our team got abiding attention even that there was a company which contacted our team after the fair. We could remind once again that our project can actually contribute to local society and deserved to be continuously researched. Accordingly, we could inform and let people perceive our project to local society and new renewable energy companies by participating as exhibitors of SWEET 2016. Moreover, we could once again realize that our project has enough potential to be further studied, confirmed by that our field is now newly developing. What’s more, it was a great chance for us to ponder on advancing our project’s future plan and even further, the directivity on field of new renewables for the development of local community. .
Conclusion
1. Increasing Awareness on Synthetic Biology in Domestic Academia
Synthetic biology, along with artificial intelligence, is under the international spotlight as a field with much potential. Not far along after the discovery of the CRISPR Cas9 system, an innovative DNA editing technology, the similar cfp1 technology was discovered and further studied. This is a proof that the international spheres of biology and medicine have recognized the potential of synthetic biology and is intensively investing and researching on it. On the contrary, the majority of the domestic companies and research institutes participated in SWEET 2016 had focused on solar based technology or generating electricity through sources like recycled waste-paper, all of which had been focused decades ago. These areas face several limitations and fall behind from the recent global trend. Accordingly, by participating in SWEET 2016, we were able to achieve one of the intended objectives of Korea_U_Seoul, to communicate with domestic academia on synthetic biology. Our activities were meaningful in that they were not just to raise awareness of synthetic biology as an independent field of study through a one-way method, but rather strived to plant the idea of synthetic biology to be utilized across academic borders to those working in other areas within environment-friendly energy. In truth, a number of companies took interest in our project and asked many questions. We hope that starting from this small step, Korea can also join the global trend in applying synthetic biology.
2. Discovering the Potential Possibilities of EMFC
EMFC stands for enzyme-microbial fuel cells, which is a combination of enzyme fuel cells (EFC) and microbial fuel cells (MFC). Although many individual 2D studies have been carried out on EFC and MFC, Korea_U_Seoul is the first to conduct research on EMFC which is the 3D combination of EFC and MFC. Even in SWEET 2016, which was under the theme of renewable energy as a solution to global problems, no other company had devised a plan that modularized, processed, and componentized biology to generate energy as we did. For this, the Korea_U_Seoul project was able to grab the attention of many companies, students and researchers at SWEET 2016. From now on, agar, which was once undervalued as an energy source, will be utilized as fuel, and our EMFC, which uses synthetically processed microorganisms to decompose agar, will change the face of existing research. It will also be the evidence that “microorganisms” can be a source of generating electricity. Additionally, instead of entering the fierce competition of the existing environment-friendly energy market, EMFC will face the innovation without competition, giving it the opportunity to create a new industry while pursuing both value-addition and cost reduction.
3. Broadening Insights as University Students
Though EMFC itself is innovative, we were also able to discover new possibilities from the booths of other companies and universities at SWEET 2016. For example, the company that had proposed the idea of utilizing the energy generated from waste disposal had the problem of dealing with the massive amount of carbon dioxide generated during the process. However, if we were to apply synthetically processed microorganisms here, we could solve the problem of carbon dioxide. Like this, if we were to apply the ideas and technology of other companies into our research or that of other areas with a 3D research approach, we would be able to develop a new field in the new renewable energy market. In the end, through its participation in SWEET 2016, Korea_U_Seoul was able to widen its novice insight.
4. The Future Direction of Korea_U_Seoul
EMFC, which modularized microorganisms through synthetic biology, is full of potential. However, just as there are problems in current environment-friendly energy research, there are also problems in EMFC. Among them is the ethical issues of utilizing “biology.” Neither can we ignore the potential danger of toxicity modularized microorganism can have on organisms of the natural world.
Also, the problem of efficiency exists. The EMFC that we have developed decomposes agar to generate electricity. However, EMFC is not efficient enough to supply the entire society. Nevertheless, there is a room for more research and the issue is open to possible solutions. As Korea_U_Seoul had felt during the participation in SWEET 2016, we will be able to overcome the problem by further research utilizing the technology of other renewable energy industries.
