Difference between revisions of "Team:Manchester/Description1"
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| − | <p>In interviews with a wide range of stakeholders, we explored the economic and regulatory constraints that would influence the implementation of our system in real-world water treatment plants, giving us detailed insights into the practices of <a href="https://2017.igem.org/Team:Manchester/HP/Water_Industry" target="_blank">innovation management</a> in the water industry. We further investigated three key areas: <a href="https://2017.igem.org/Team:Manchester/HP/Intellectual_Property" target="_blank">intellectual property</a>, GMO legislation and industrial scale-up which informed us to develop our extensive business plan. Investigation on intellectual property and GMO legislation in the UK inspired us our <a href="https://2017.igem.org/Team:Manchester/Collaborations" target="_blank">international collaboration</a> with other iGEM teams to generate a worldwide legislation map, with the aim of assessing potential international markets where our project could be implemented. A <a href="https://2017.igem.org/Team:Manchester/Model/Continuous_Culture" target="_blank">continuous culture model</a> was also incorporated in consideration of industrial scale-up to predict the rate at which Phosphostore devices could be produced on different substrates, allowing us to estimate the yearly cost of treating wastewater using Phosphostore.</p> | + | <p>In interviews with a wide range of stakeholders, we explored the economic and regulatory constraints that would influence the implementation of our system in real-world water treatment plants, giving us detailed insights into the practices of <a href="https://2017.igem.org/Team:Manchester/HP/Water_Industry" target="_blank">innovation management</a> in the water industry. We further investigated three key areas: <a href="https://2017.igem.org/Team:Manchester/HP/Intellectual_Property" target="_blank">intellectual property</a>, GMO legislation and industrial scale-up which informed us to develop our extensive <a href="https://2017.igem.org/Team:Manchester/Entrepreneurship" target="_blank">business plan</a>. Investigation on intellectual property and GMO legislation in the UK inspired us our <a href="https://2017.igem.org/Team:Manchester/Collaborations" target="_blank">international collaboration</a> with other iGEM teams to generate a worldwide legislation map, with the aim of assessing potential international markets where our project could be implemented. A <a href="https://2017.igem.org/Team:Manchester/Model/Continuous_Culture" target="_blank">continuous culture model</a> was also incorporated in consideration of industrial scale-up to predict the rate at which Phosphostore devices could be produced on different substrates, allowing us to estimate the yearly cost of treating wastewater using Phosphostore.</p> |
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Revision as of 18:11, 1 November 2017
Project Description
Introduction
Phosphate supplementation is essential for maximizing plant yields in many agricultural settings. However, phosphate runoff from fields often causes eutrophication, leading to the deterioration of aquatic ecosystems. Moreover phosphate rock is a finite and increasingly scarce resource. Together, these two issues suggest a closed-loop solution. We aim to address this issue using a system which could sequester and store high levels of phosphate: Phosphostore. Phosphostore uses genetically-modified bacteria that can accumulate phosphate from wastewater in protein-based microcompartments for future recycling. In our project, we expressed Eut (Ethanolamine utilisation) bacterial microcompartments and a polyphosphate kinase (PPK) enzyme with a Pdu (1,2-propanediol utilisation) localization tag. This enables the encapsulation of the PPK enzyme within the microcompartment, allowing the formation of polyphosphate chains to be built and stored safely from degradation by endogenous exopolyphosphatase (PPX). We were able to proof the concept of our project through fluorescent microscopy, which can be seen here.
Improving our System
We utilized a Design of Experiments approach to design a system with the required properties that would make our solution feasible on a larger scale. This statistical method was used to optimize the expression of our key PPK enzyme. Two rounds of DoE enabled us to identify the optimal conditions for the expression of this enzyme. DoE was also used to identify the optimum expression conditions for microcompartment expression. An innovative ensemble modelling approach was also utilized to predict the operating characteristics of our phosphate starvation operon as a regulatory system for controlling microcompartment synthesis.
Real World
In interviews with a wide range of stakeholders, we explored the economic and regulatory constraints that would influence the implementation of our system in real-world water treatment plants, giving us detailed insights into the practices of innovation management in the water industry. We further investigated three key areas: intellectual property, GMO legislation and industrial scale-up which informed us to develop our extensive business plan. Investigation on intellectual property and GMO legislation in the UK inspired us our international collaboration with other iGEM teams to generate a worldwide legislation map, with the aim of assessing potential international markets where our project could be implemented. A continuous culture model was also incorporated in consideration of industrial scale-up to predict the rate at which Phosphostore devices could be produced on different substrates, allowing us to estimate the yearly cost of treating wastewater using Phosphostore.
