Team:Manchester/Description1
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.
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 modelling 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.
as well as utilize a Design of Experiments approach to design a system with the required properties (e.g. the correct shell protein ratios for proper microcompartment formation) that would make our solution feasible on a larger scale.
