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Revision as of 13:46, 26 October 2017
BIOMATERIAL
PHA
CALCIUM CARBONATE
In recent years, the interest in obtaining microbial cement gained its popularity along with such problems as fractures and fissures in concrete structures which is created by weathering, land subsidence, faults, earthquakes and human activities. Synthetic biology proposed a novel way to repair or remediate caused problems - is biomineralization of calcium carbonate using microbes such as Bacillus species. The application of microbial concrete to construction may simplify some of the existing construction processes and revolutionize the ways of new construction process.
Though multiple mechanisms are proposed to participate calcium carbonate, most efforts focused on the ureolysis driven precipitation from different specie origins (P Anbu et al. 2016).
The limit to apply this method in diverse scenario could be the additional precursor urea itself. Also, because the precipitation is physico-chemically dominant, when the environment is too acidic, ureolysis driven mechanism is likely to fail.
Instead of calcite precipitation from natural microbial, many other organisms also have the power to produce calcium carbonate, such as corals. In stony coral, Stylophora pistillata, 4 acid-rich proteins (CARPs 1–4; GenBank accession numbers KC148537–KC148539 and KC493647) were identified to be responsible for calcium carbonate precipitation (Tail Mass et al. 2013).
The putative mechanism of calcium carbonate nucleation is that the highly acidic pocket of CARPs localize the substrate, buffer and catalyze the reaction between calcium ion and carboxylate (the figure below). In a high-resolution magnetic resonance spectroscopy analyses, evidences have been shown that the calcification in stony coral is mainly biologically controlled and relatively robust, due to the template-induced nucleation mediated by the skeleton organic matrix, in particular, acid-rich proteins like CARPs (Stanislas Von Euw et al. 2017) .
As such, bioreaction of aragonite formation is far from the thermodynamic equilibrium. It may even compromise with acidification and very low mineral saturation state (E. Tambutté & A. A. Venn et al. 2015). All CARP 1-4 can be cloned and expressed in E.coli BL21 strain and remain the activity. Each of them is able to independently catalyze the calcification in artificial seawater. This method we decided to use and improve in our project/ due to the our project.
POLYSILICATE
Centre for Research and Interdisciplinarity (CRI)
Faculty of Medicine Cochin Port-Royal, South wing, 2nd floor
Paris Descartes University
24, rue du Faubourg Saint Jacques
75014 Paris, France
bettencourt.igem2017@gmail.com
bettencourt.igem2017@gmail.com 
