Team:ICT-Mumbai/Description

Project Description




Our Motivation

Public toilets are associated with a foul odour, which is primarily due to ammonia released from decomposition of urine. Not only is ammonia a health hazard, it also deters potential users! Some of the existing solutions to tackle the stench in urinals are:

Bio Blocks® are placed in urinals so that they are contacted by urine. These Bio Blocks contain surfactants and frozen microbial spores that break urea into compounds other than ammonia.
Waterless toilets exist, but they come at a cost. Also, as plumbing systems are usually not built to run without water, over time, urea in the urine crystallizes and chokes the system.
Using air fresheners in toilets is a band-aid solution that only masks the stench. Moreover, the fragrance fades after some time ☹

We wish to tackle this situation to make using public toilets less taxing on the senses. Using the tools of synthetic biology, we plan to work toward completely eliminating the odour, instead of merely masking it.






What we intend to do...

Click the image below to see the methodology proposed
Process Description


We aim to engineer E. coli to assimilate ammonia from the environment, converting it into innocuous byproducts. The engineered microbes will be housed in a compact and portable device that can be installed in public toilets. Air containing ammonia will be channeled through this device, and ammonia will be utilized by the microbes as a source of nitrogen.