Team:York/Project/Project Description

Project Description

With the decreasing supply but increasing demand for fossil fuels, biofuels are a renewable alternative to help cope with our growing energy needs. We aim to develop and optimize a stable microbial co-culture system whereby the source of energy is light, and carbon flows from CO2 in the atmosphere to synthesize a biofuel. This simple synthetic microbial community will comprise Chlamydomonas, an algae, that will produce sugars through photosynthesis to feed the biofuel-producing E. coli, ideally resulting in a growth system that could reduce the cost of feedstock materials for biofuel production. However, their differing growth rates would likely result in an unstable system in which one organism might outgrow the other. We will solve this by building a digital holographic microscope (DHM), which can monitor the two microbial species in real time, and a feedback system to control the respective populations. The nature of our system is such that upon completion, there is potential for modification of the system to produce other high value products such as feedstock for the manufacturing industry, or therapeutics, with a reduction in overall production cost. + pictures of problems with current biofuel technology +