Everything is Connected!

Prologue

On November 2015, Indonesia massively highlighted as the second worst plastic polluters to the sea. It inspires us to develop a project benefiting the environment and Indonesia image. We came up with a project named Dewaruci. It should be inspiring and sustainable. For that, we involve various stakeholder into our project design, execution, and future outlook. Here is how everything is connected.

Bioreactor Concept Design

Dr.Sri Harjati Suhardi gave us an insight into the future application of our project. She suggests us to build a safety containment in order to prove the GMO is safe first. Therefore, we made a bioreactor concept as the first stage of future application. We hope this concept could be enhanced and realized in the near future.

The bioreactor operates on batch mode with a hundred liters of capacity. To satisfy the air requirement, we supply 2 vvm continuously to the vessel. The medium used is 1.5 kg of molasses as a minimum carbon source. The nitrogen sources used is fish waste which amount 0.5 kg on minimum. A hundred milliliter Kanamicyn used to prevent another bacteria growth in the vessel. Sea water input for a batch operation is 100L. The diagram is given below:

There are two operation stage:

1. Inoculation Stage On this stage, the bacteria growth until reaches quorum sensing, 1 × 107 times of the initial bacterial number. According to our growth kinetics model, the time needed to reach the quorum sensing is 10 hours. The assumption used is the bacterial growth rate is half its maximum value.

2. Degradation Stage Sea water is pumped into vessel and the bacteria will degrade the plastic debris as well as micro-plastic. The mixing rate should be reduced in order to minimize the drag force when bacteria starts forming a biofilm on PET surface.

Indonesia iGEM Booklet Vol. 1

Public engagement program gave us an overview about people awareness on synthetic biology. We are trying to increase the awareness by writing a booklet. The booklet was written in Bahasa to prevent a language barrier in the learning process. It is consist of the synthetic biology basic knowledge and our projects. The basic knowledge includes the definition of synthetic biology, part, device, and system. We also elaborate the previous, recent and future outlook of our iGEM projects. We put the past four years of ITB team human practice, dry lab, and wet lab in detail. It was our contribution to inspire another Indonesian team. The booklet then distributed to academician through an email.

Conclusion