Welcome to the 2017 Colegio Franklin Delano Roosevelt iGEM team's Wiki!
We are the first and only team to participate in the competition representing Peru.
One of the most persistent, complicated problems in poultry agriculture is the removal of feather waste. Chicken feathers are mostly comprised of keratin, a strong, fibrous protein that can not be degraded by the likes of conventional proteases such as bromelain, pepsin, papain, or any naturally produced bacterial enzyme. Failure to remove these feathers from the farms, or degrade them fully, can lead to extreme health, as well as environment, related issues. One of these issues is transmission of diseases when the feathers are not degraded properly -- Avian Flu (H5N1), has the potential to wipe out chicken populations, and has also killed approximately 60% of all humans who have been afflicted with the disease since 1997. Our project works to develop a safe, environmentally-friendly solution to this problem involving expressing keratinases kerA & kerBL sequences into a strain of Bacillus Subtilis through transformation and assembling a prototype which will allow for a more complete degradation of the keratin in the aforementioned feathers.
