Team:British Columbia
Project Description
Petroleum-derived chemicals are used as building blocks to create a variety of products we take for granted in our day to day lives. And while these molecules have proven to be critical for modern society, their overuse has had significant negative environmental and societal impacts. Microbial biocatalysts play a prominent role in the future of renewable biomass degradation into bio-equivalent chemicals that can be used directly in established industrial processes. However, there is high cost to process raw biomass into a usable form which has remained a major obstacle in successfully implementing these techniques in industry.
During our brainstorming process we came up with the initial idea of using an engineered microbial community to effectively transform biomass into useful products. We were inspired by new research at our university on the expression of functional enzymes onto the S-Layer of certain strains of bacteria. We aim to use these new techniques together with traditional bacterial bio-catalytic pathways to make the processing and utilization of renewable biomass feedstocks cheaper and more efficient.
To accomplish this task, we are designing a two-part microbial community. One half will be responsible for transforming biomass feeds stalks such as lignin and cellulose into useful growth substrates. While the other half will focus on using these growth substrates for the production of useful products.
To create our biomass transforming bacterium, we will use the robust surface expression system in the bacterium Caulobacter crescentus to display biomass transforming enzymes, mimicking the cellulosomes and laccases found in natural biomass degrading bacteria. To create our production bacterium, we will engineer Escherichia coli, to produce violacein. Violacein is a high-value natural product with interesting pharmacological properties. It also has the benefit of being easily detected and quantified, allowing for the validation of our approach. When combined, these bacterial strains will be able to work together to degrade and valorize biomass.
So far our team has been working to characterize a bio-bricked β-carotene construct in E. coli in order to do an initial proof of concept, we have also been working on the violacein construct. Simultaneously we have been cloning several laccases and celluloses into the s-layer protein of C. crescentus. We hope to get functional expression of our enzymes onto the s-layer and characterize the enzymatic activity to build and active model for our system which we can test by growing the two bacteria together in minimal media with restricted carbon sources.
Welcome to iGEM 2016!
Your team has been approved and you are ready to start the iGEM season!
Before you start:
Please read the following pages:
Styling your wiki
You may style this page as you like or you can simply leave the style as it is. You can easily keep the styling and edit the content of these default wiki pages with your project information and completely fulfill the requirement to document your project.
While you may not win Best Wiki with this styling, your team is still eligible for all other awards. This default wiki meets the requirements, it improves navigability and ease of use for visitors, and you should not feel it is necessary to style beyond what has been provided.
Wiki template information
We have created these wiki template pages to help you get started and to help you think about how your team will be evaluated. You can find a list of all the pages tied to awards here at the Pages for awards link. You must edit these pages to be evaluated for medals and awards, but ultimately the design, layout, style and all other elements of your team wiki is up to you!
Editing your wiki
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Use WikiTools - Edit in the black menu bar to edit this page
Tips
This wiki will be your team’s first interaction with the rest of the world, so here are a few tips to help you get started:
- State your accomplishments! Tell people what you have achieved from the start.
- Be clear about what you are doing and how you plan to do this.
- You have a global audience! Consider the different backgrounds that your users come from.
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- Avoid using very small fonts and low contrast colors; information should be easy to read.
- Start documenting your project as early as possible; don’t leave anything to the last minute before the Wiki Freeze. For a complete list of deadlines visit the iGEM 2016 calendar
- Have lots of fun!
Inspiration
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