Team:NCKU Tainan/Description
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Description
Background
Food crisis will become one of the greatest challenges by 2050. Thankfully, fishery gives us relative sustainable resource to meet the ever-growing demand. With capture fishery remaining static, aquaculture has been responsible for the rapid growth and reaches half of world total production of aquatic animals.
Successful aquaculture needs good water quality, especially the nitrate concentration should be under control. If the nitrate concentration is too high, the fish will easily get sick and even die. To lower the nitrate level down, an easiest and cheapest way for fish farmers is to use the groundwater to replace the dirty water. Obviously, there exists two problems.
First, groundwater sustains the buildings’ foundation. Over pumping groundwater lead to the ‘’Stratum Subsidence’’ and also result in ‘’Seawater Intrusion’’ and follow by ‘’Soil Salinization’’----This phenomenon is quite familiar in Tainan, where contributes to 1/4 of total value of aquaculture production in Taiwa
Second, the farmers rarely treat the huge amount of waste water for economic purpose. They directly pour untreated water into the river, which lead to algae overgrowing, block the sunshine and destroy water ecosystem.
These problems do not only exist in southern Taiwan but also happen worldwide. For example, in Punjab groundwater levels have dropped 10 meters since 1979. To stop this, our team try to eradicate it from the root---‘’Reducing nitrate concentration in water’’. We want to solve the problems within micro-organism while not to disturb the industry. Thus, we created a sensing and intermediate regulating system named "NO problem" to treat exceed nitrate. In this way, we keep water in good quality and reduce water usage to prohibit problems from worsening.
Sensing Device & Sensing Bacteria
Sensing device of "NO problem" is a boat equipped of course motor and control module. It is designed to contain a pH meter, a thermometer and a nitrate sensor.
Nitrate sensor is a device with reactor and LASER. The reactor contains genetically modified E. coli and will emit different fluorescent intensity when dealing with various concentration of nitrate in water. By determining the fluorescent level and cross-referring with data lines which we've constructed in advanced, we can accurately calculate the concentration of nitrate in water. Additionally, PH meter and thermometer allow us to obtain basic information of water. After determining those characteristics of water, combining with GPS data we will upload them to a server and transfer those data to our App. By using smartphone, the users can easily get the information about their fish pond immediately. They can make the appropriate solution before it is too late to regulate the water quality. For the sake of mobility and portability, we construct this device into a boat, which can move around collecting data and is easy to carry.
The biological method in our nitrate sensing system shows below: We use a promoter which named PyeaR. This promoter has strong specificity in sensing the concentration of nitrate in the water. And in case to collect the data more easily, the GFP gene has also been constructed on our plasmid. Furthermore, we use the lyophilized E. coli powder instead of liquid state E. coli to imitate the condition of our device and also give a more stable detecting system. We use the nitrate which concentration less than 100 ppm to test the function of PyeaR.
Regulation Device & Bacteria
After testing the abnormal data, our boat will notify the fishfarmers through app, and they can turn on the regulation system, which can change nitrate to glutamine in four critical steps.
First, nitrate is transformed into nitrite by NaR cluster, which exist in E. coli naturally. Second, nitrite reductase (NiR) changes nitrite into ammonium. Third, glutamate dehydrogenase (GDH) turn ammonium into glutamate. Last step, glutamine synthetase (GS) catalyzes glutamate to glutamine. We put all these genes into E. coli.
We did a lot of experiment to construction and test the function of our bricks. All of the laboratory tests get good results, which means our team successfully transform nitrate waste into useful substance.
This constructed E. coli is coated on scouring pad and work within our regulation box. Also, we have tested the our regulation box and the results are satisfying.
Integrated HP
Our integrated HP included four interviews with aquaculture experts and one street survey. Experts divided into academic institution and local industry. The former we chose ‘’Center of Shrimp Disease Control and Genetic Improvement’’ and the latter included one Prawn fishing owner and an aquaculture farmer. Moreover, we went to an aquaculture farm to know the environment in reality.
Furthermore, we did collaboration with MDSH, CSMU and NTHU. We also joined 2017 Asia Pacific Conference.>
For education, we endeavored in three parts: elementary school education, high school education and college promotion. We held 5 weeks popular science classes in elementary school, visited two high schools: NEHS and KGHS to share the concept of synthetic biology and our project. In college promotion, we set up stand in our school annual festival and held two presentation.
Conclusion
To solve nitrate problem, our sensing boat collect sample and identify its location by GPS system. The sensing data will be sent to the server through Wi-Fi and be analyzed immediately and push to the cloud through the internet. If the level of nitrate is higher than expected, our regulation box can turn on automatically, pump out the water and remove 99% of the nitrate in it.
In this way, we regulate the nitrate concentration to make fish alive instead of using large amounts of water, which avoids over pumping groundwater and follow-up ecological crisis.
We used micro-organism to change all the problems into "NO problem "
