Team:NWU-CHINA/Description
Description
Oil pollution is one of the environmental issues that attract more and more attention. It not only harms creatures immediately, but cause continuous damage to polluted area, which will cause severe harm to environment. Besides, oil polluted area is hard to recovered as well. So, solving the problem of oil pollution has been a dream of people for a long time. So, recovering areas from oil contamination has been a dream of people for a long time.
This year, we opened our mind. We didn’t limit our mind in recovery, but focused on the prevention. There is a saying goes that a small leak will sink a great ship. On analogy of this, many of oil pollutions are caused by oil spill and some little leak will cause oil spill. If these kinds of leak be found in the beginning, some accident won’t occur any more. Therefore, with using those creature degrading oil, such as bacteria, we are willing to sense oil and find a way expressing this signal to detect leak in a early time. By this way, we want to prevent oil spill and make the world better. This is our Alkane biosensor.
Background
Oil pollution is a problem ailed people for a very long time. People have tried a lot of method to deal with this problem, such as, oil boom method, mechanical method, adsorption method, chemical treatment, and biological method. However, these methods cannot meet the requirement of environment recovery. For example, oil boom can only treat a small scale of oil spill; chemical reagent used in chemical method can be more poisonous than oil; biodegradation doesn’t have ideal degradation value.
Design
We got inspiration from 2016 Sydney Australia. They used regulating circuit in ethylene degradation bacteria as sensor gene and used chromoprotein gene as reporter gene to develop an ethylene detection bacteria. They applied this to evaluating fruit ripeness. We are inspired from this method. Based on our lab′s researching, we hope we can utilize the circuit regulating alkane degradation in P.a to construct an alkane detection bacteria.
