Team:Tartu TUIT/HP/Gold Integrated
For our gold medal criteria, we looked more into the problems concerning our ethylene production. Our subpopulation approach will use sucrose as a substrate, which is a carbon-neutral process. To reduce the food vs fuel conflict we looked into lignocellulose and the sucrose production using cyanobacterium. As we thought of these ideas mostly thanks to Graanul Invest, who contacted us in the beginning of October. Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough time to implement our possible solutions into the project.
We got sponsored by Graanul Invest, an Estonian wood pellet producer. They were interested in our project and proposed the idea of biodegradation of lignocelluloses (for example from their wood pellets.) as a possibility to solve the food vs fuel conflict by the use of sucrose. Therefore we started looking more into the possibility of using sugar from the lignocellulose as substrate.
The other option could be adding Synechococcus elongates a sucrose-secreting cyanobacterium, which would be engineered to over-express an Escherichia coli gene cscB to effectively secrete intercellular sucrose, to our cultures. The cyanobacterium would use CO2 and light while being in salt-stress to make sucrose, which would be secreted to the media.
We didn’t have time to implement these ideas, but we think that these would be a valid possibility to make our project better. With the lignocellulose approach, we would make this approach a reality for Estonia, as we have a lot of biomass.
Resources:
1. Arfi, Y. (2014) Integration of bacterial lytic polysaccharide monooxygenases into designer cellulosomes promotes enhanced cellulose degradation http://www.pnas.org/content/111/25/9109.full (16.10.2017)
2. Li, T. et al. (2017). Mimicking lichens: incorporation of yeast strains together with sucrose-secreting cyanobacteria improves survival, growth, ROS removal, and lipid production in a stable mutualistic co-culture production platform. Biotechnology for Biofuels https://biotechnologyforbiofuels.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13068-017-0736-x (16.10.2017)
2. Li, T. et al. (2017). Mimicking lichens: incorporation of yeast strains together with sucrose-secreting cyanobacteria improves survival, growth, ROS removal, and lipid production in a stable mutualistic co-culture production platform. Biotechnology for Biofuels https://biotechnologyforbiofuels.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13068-017-0736-x (16.10.2017)
