Description of our project

Bacteria are an amazing field to work on. They can develop a wide variety of functionalities and properties in a very short time, being easy to work with and extremely versatile. On this basis, we wanted to take advantage of one of the most remarkable characteristics of the bacteria we work with, Pseudomonas putida – the ability to form biofilms. These structures are composed of communities of bacteria which are integrated in an extracellular polysaccharide matrix that protects them from several kinds of stress. In addition, they have an increased metabolism, a feature that is often required in industrial production.

Therefore, we thought that it would be a good application to try and do some bioremediation with these strong and powerful bacteria. First, we thought about glyphosate, an herbicide that has been dproved to be toxic to human. But due to technical difficulties, we could not continue with that idea. Instead, we found out about glycerol. It is being overproduced in the biofuel industry, and it is starting to become an environmental problem. So we started to model how our bacteria would eat that glycerol, using biofilms for that. But, is there anything else we can do once the bacteria are eating glycerol? We decided that there could be a compound we could produce with these biological reactors, and our choice was propionate. It is widely used in a large variety of fields, easy to excrete from our bacteria and, according to the model, easy to produce. Let’s get started!