OUR PROJECT - WHATS THE PROBLEM?

Our project deals with an everyday problem described by the following scenario: You want to enjoy a refreshing shower in the morning, but your hairy roommate clogged the drain again? You would like to have a relaxed bubble bath after a long day, but there are bad odors coming out of the pipe system?
The general practice now:
1.You try the ‘hot water method’ to flush the drain… nothing happens
2.You remember what your mother taught you, so you put a fancy mix of vinegar, baking soda and some magic into the drain… a mysterious creature arises, but nothing else happens
3.In the end there is just one thing left – you put the nasty chemical mixture of the stinky cleaning agent down the drain. The corrosive cloud disappears and you can finally take your shower… still trying not to breath in the acrid fumes.

OUR SOLUTION

We would like to create a sustainable and eco-friendly cleaning agent to remove hair, residues of fat and soap that lead to a blockage of pipe systems in private households. Our idea is, to develop an agent based on an intact microbial system expressing enzymes like proteases, keratinases, lipases, or esterases to LIGHT UP THE PIPE again.

OUR EXTRA

As a special feature we want to use the metabolites of the enzymatic degradation to produce a lovely rose-scent to refresh your whole room. In addition this reaction could also be used to indicate that the enzymes are working efficiently on your drainage problem.

RESEARCH

During the theroretical research and the brainstorming sessions we discovered many interesting projects: To filter fine dust with yeast flocculation, rose-scented Escherichia coli, and so on. In the end we decided to work on keratinases, esterases and lipases to develope a keranolytic Escherichia coli. The projects of past iGEM-teams were part of our investigation too and we are already co-working with iGEM-team OLS_Canmore 2015/2016 to exchange information. We would like to use the knowledge of these groundworks to develop a new type of enzymatic cleaning agent by complementing and combining ideas out of different scientific sources. To differ from other projects we are aiming to engineer Escherichia coli to express enzymes like proteases, keratinases, lipases, or esterases into the medium. Due to the extracellular expression expensive and time-consuming purification steps could be avoided and the enzymes could be secreted directly into the drain.