Team:NTHU Taiwan/Future Plans
Future Plans
In our project, we use Fac-dex enzyme to break the carbon-fluorine bond. However, Fac-dex can only break the carbon-fluorine bond on alpha carbon; still, there remains 13 fluorine atoms on the carbon chain. In the future, we want to design a cyclic reaction to degrade PFOA completely.
Because of limited time, we only worked on PFOA bioremediation experiment. Nonetheless, as we have shown previously, there are many other classes of PFCs existing, such as PFOS and PFOSA (perfluorooctanesulfonamide). In the future, we hope to degrade more classes of PFCs via synthetic biology.
Today we use HPLC (high performance liquid chromatography) to examine whether the water sample contain PFCs. But HPLC equipment is very expensive. We hope to set up a cascade activated by PFCs in E.coli. This cascade may induce a specific promoter and expresses downstream color gene. Simply by observing the absorbance of light, we can learn the approximate concentration of PFCs in the water.
By adding sensors to our device and building a system to send the data to smart phones, we can get real-time information anywhere through smart phones.
Promote and insert our device in to wastewater treatment plants and Water Corporation.
