Difference between revisions of "Team:Manchester/Description"

Phosphorus, one of the most common element on earth, is a fundamental element for all living organisms. From DNA to cell membranes, phosphorus is essential for a variety of biological molecules. Phosphorus is also vital for food production as it is one of the three main component of agricultural fertilizers, alongside nitrogen and potassium.

Unfortunately, phosphate rock is a finite resource. The vast majority of the reserves can only be found in Morocco which controls 77% of the global phosphate reserves with 50 billion tonnes. Peak phosphorus is expected to be reached around 2030 and reserves are predicted to be exhausted in 50-100 years if current rates of extraction does not change. This will deliver a serious blow to the rising world population as meeting increasing demand for food may become an impossible task.

At the same time, significant amounts of phosphorus end up in rivers and lakes as agricultural wastewater, giving rise to a major environmental problem: eutrophication. Eutrophication creates algal blooms, exhausting dissolved oxygen levels and killing aquatic organisms, thus heavily reducing biodiversity and disrupting our ecosystem. There is a need for a solution to conserve and recycle phosphate efficiently.

We are engineering a bacteria that can store and accumulate increased levels of phosphate through microcompartments. Phosphate is stored in bacteria in the form of a polyphosphate chain, built by the enzyme, polyphosphate kinase (PPK). Exopolyphosphatase (PPX) functions to breaks down this chain, providing phosphate to be used by the bacteria.

We are targeting PPK to the inside of the microcompartment, enabling chains of phosphate to be stored within the protective protein shell. Because it is inside this storage, PPX and the bacteria cannot get access to the phosphate chain and therefore will take up more phosphate from its surroundings to make up for the unaccessible phosphate. This creates a bacteria that can take up and store a higher level of phosphate than normal.

To find out how we will achieve this experimentally, please click here to visit our wet lab page.