Overview
Team:SCUT-China A/HP/Silver
In order to get a comprehensive assessment of our project on the application of biodesulfurization, we have accomplished our human practices mainly on the following five aspects of work.
First of all, we made a statistical analysis of all the iGEM projects related to environmental issues in recent years and expressed our expectations. Overall, we hope to explore the full potential of biodesulfurization and spare no efforts to promote it. Also, based on our knowledge of the current situation of oil desulfurization combined with relevant data analysis, we put forward an idea of designing a project with BIODESULFURIZATION as its theme. When we generally finished designing the project framework, we used online survey to get a better understanding of how people are aware of and concerned about the BIODESULFURIZATION, and we will try to come up with corresponding solutions to dispel their concerns.
Secondly, we communicated with professor Liu Zehua on several questions raised in our questionnaire. Professor Liu gave us lots of good advice, and pointed out some new problems that we need to solve.
Thirdly, we compared the cost estimation of using E.coli for desulfurization, which was calculated based on collected data, to that of other oil desulfurization methods, and it turned out that our project has significant advantages on economic benefits. Consequently because of the prominent economic efficiency, biodesulfurization using engineered E.coli would be a good choice for enterprises as well as for oil production.
Fourthly, we confirmed the feasibility of our project on industrial production, and designed a specific industrial desulfurizing procedure.
Last, we have made a proposed policy about bio-safety. Then we succeed arranging a meeting with the Guangzhou Environmental Protection Administration, from whom we want to obtain good suggestions for reference to finalize our program and ensure the bio-safety of our product application.
Pre-investigations and Formulation of our project
First of all, we made a data pool, which is the statistics of all environmental projects in iGEM from 2008 to 2015, to stress the increasing importance of environmental protection.
There are some representative data.
Table 1 The data of all environmental projects in iGEM from 2008 to 2015
Figure 1 The number of environmental projects each year
Figure 1 indicates the tendency of the increasing number of all iGEM projects and environmental projects over time. While in 2013, the number of all iGEM projects obviously decreased, and in 2014, the number of environmental projects obviously decreased. The highest proportion is in 2013.
It means that the attention iGEM teams draw on environment is stabilized. They try to protect environment using synthetic biology, but there aren’t many feasible ideas for this part.
Table 2 The number of environmental projects in six continents from 2008 to 2015
Figure 2 The number of environmental projects in six continents from 2008 to 2015
Table 2 & Figure 2 count the number of environmental projects from six continents during these 8 years. We can find that the number is similar among Europe, Asia and North America.
Table 3 The number of different types of environmental projects
Figure 3 The number of different types of environmental projects
Figure 3 lists out all the number of different kinds of environmental projects respectively. As the data shows evidently, the water pollution draws the largest attention. And most projects are focused on the treatment of heavy metal in water.
Through this data pool, we got a whole picture of iGEMteams’ awareness of environmental protection all over the world. And contrast to teams in Europe, Asia and North America, we can draw a conclusion that other continents’ people perhaps pay less attention to environmental protection. The reason maybe that countries in these continents still focus on developing economics and industry. We hope that more international aid would be served to those countries to help them, which would also have profound meaning to our only home—the earth.
Previously we learned that sulfur pollution has great negative effect on environment. However, we found that few of the previous iGEM projects were really related to oil desulfurization, even in those projects about air pollution treatments. Therefore, our project with the theme of oil desulfurization, aimed at protecting the environment, becomes a brand new idea among all the environmental protection-related iGEM projects.
Questionnaire
1.What do you think are the causes of acid rain and haze?
2.What do you think are the most urgent environmental problems to be solved?
Acid rain and haze have adverse impact on people's life and health, to which the exhaust emission of petroleum refinery is considered to be the main cause.
3.Do you think it is necessary to raise the current standard of sulfur emission?
the standard of sulfate emission is thought to be raised.
4.What do you concern about BDS?
We will continue further study after we succeed in constructing the bacteria.
We plan to improve our project by designing a system that is able to collect and kill those bacteria after their enzymes are inactive in oil-processing plant.
And in the option of "other", some people raise a concern that during the fermentation the E.coli will produce an odor even if they don’t in the process of biodesulfurization, which will affect the people living near the fermentation factories. And we will try to find some ways to solve this problem.
Communication
Communication with Professor Liu from SCUT Department of Environment and Energy
After hearing our project, he expressed his worries about the potential threats of our project to the environment, and suggested that a suicidal mechanism should be built for our engineered bacteria, for which an efflux pump is recommended.
Also, professor Liu pointed out that the economic benefits of our project may not be so great even if our project is able to improve the quality of oil. Because commonly the tail gas produced by oil burning will pass a filter device that blocks the sulfur gases from entering the atmosphere. Therefore, in his opinion, we should make a comprehensive assessment of our project comparing to the current sulfur filter device, in order to pursue the optimal economic efficiency.
As for the environment, the higher efficiency of oil desulfurization means better quality petroleum, which means less pollution.
Professor Liu also provided many valuable suggestions on the preciseness of the experiment part, including making blank control to ensure that the degradation of DBT to HBP is the work of our engineered bacteria rather than other inorganic factors. Besides, he gave us some guidance on how to evaluate the cost of our project.
From the communication, we were provided with expert advice and suggested that we should pay more attention to both safety and economic benefit to ensure the feasibility of the industrial productive application of our product.
Communication with FAFU Team
After the CCIC, a special strain of E.coli that has the odour gene knocked out was sent to us by FAFU team, to help with our bacterium stinking problem, which is considered to be a big obstacle to the industrial applications of our engineered bacteria. We succeed to solve the odor problem.
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