Team:ShanghaitechChina/Design
Brainstorming Project :
Before first meet-up, we have divided the ShanghaiTechChina team in four subgroups. Each subgroup should suggest three projects and ideas, research about their impact and viability, as well as how they would present synthetic biology principle. At first meeting, four subgroups came up with their three projects and present why they chose this idea. Then, we summarized and classified all the twelve projects into five different tracks. After 6 meetings and lots of discussions, the chosen was “Solar Hunter”, mainly due to its innovative features and aims to convert solar energy into chemical energy in nonphotosynthetic bacterium.
Biofilm :
Microorganism Choice:
From scientific reviews, we found that two different bacterium Geobacter sulfurreducens and Shewanella oneidensis.1,2 They can naturally express nanowires and transfer electrons between each other or do direct interspecies electron transfer (DIET) with other microorganisms.3 For the execution of the project, two organisms were considered: Geobacter sulfurreducens and Escherichia coli. These have been chosen mainly based on easy handling, data from literature correlating such organisms with the synthesis of the biofilm of interest, as well as their availability.
Geobacter sulfurreducens can naturally express pili, which possess metallic-like conductivity and essential for long-range electron transport to insoluble electron acceptors and interspecies electron transfer.1 So this strain was the main candidate to be used in our project. Furthermore, Geobacter sulfurreducens is a simple organism and whole genome has been mapped.4
Escherichia coli is the most widely studied prokaryotic model microorganism in the world. This bactria is easy to culture and replace, knock in or out specific genes. What’s more, there are various of defined protocols for homologous recombination! Despite this, some iGEM team in the past few years have already tested or done some work about constructing the electron transfer system in Escherichia coli.
