Difference between revisions of "Team:Newcastle/Proof/MFC"

Revision as of 18:43, 17 October 2016

Microbial Fuel Cell with Yeast

Our original experiment, which looked at making a microbial fuel cell using yeast, followed the University of Reading’s protocol kindly given to us by Dr Ed Milner, Dr Paniz Izadi and Professor Ian Head. The protocol can be seen here

After discussing the ethical issues of using yeast with PEALS, we decided to change our constructs to E. coli. However, we generally used the same protocol as above and made only slight changes, such as using 1g of arabinose as well as the 9g of glucose dissolved in 50ml of potassium phosphate buffer. Around 4ml of the BBa_K1895004 and the BBa_K1895005 was added to individual fuel cells.

The fuel cells was left to run for an hour and the voltage was taken every 3 minutes.

Figure 1. The cells with large pores was our BBa_K1895005 construct. The cells with the small pores was our BBa_K1895004 construct. The small pores with no arabinose were left to row with just the glucose solution. The LB was set as a negative control. The error bars are the mean ± the standard error. For the LB and Small Pores without arabinose, the standard error was neglible and so cannot be seen clearly on the figure ddue to the scale bars.

After looking at the growth of the constructs, we can confirm that by placing the constructs under the pBAD arbinose-induced promoter, we can increase the overall growth of the battery constructs. Therefore we have improved upon Bielfeld 2013 teams part who struggled to get their part to grow when placed under a T7 promoter.