After our experiments started, new problems began to arise. There were many vague points in our design, such as the knowledge about the reactor and the choice for using which organism as our host. All these questions put forward by us were figured out gradually through our further HP activities.
Choosing the host
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At the beginning of the project, we must make sure the idea we have conceived is feasible. Therefore, we had a long term communication with professor David Leys, one of the authors of the article Reductive dehalogenase structure suggests a mechanism for B12-dependent dehalogenation, which is published in 2015 on Nature. It reports the characterization of RdhANP, the novel dehalogenase we have make a brief introduction in Introduction. |
Thanks to his help, we learnt a lot of new progresses in this area and avoided many detours. At first, we decided to apply our dehalogenase in E. coli because of its benefit to be rebuilt. But after emailing with professor David Leys, we reconsidered our decision carefully and finally planned to express it in B. megaterium, which is more beneficial to RdhANP’s expression and thus makes our project more feasible.
Membrane Bioreactor
Qiu Dongru(Left) and He Feng Re(Right), Researchers of Institute of Hydrobiology(IHB), Chinese Academy of Science (CAS)
We got in touch and had a meeting with researcher Qiu Dongru, and researcher Feng He on May 5th, who work on environmental microbiology and environmental engineering. After we presented our project and some problems to be solved, the two researchers provided their suggestions and answered our questions one by one, which made all of us enlightened. For example, Qiu introduced the common usage of activated sludge in sewage disposal. In sewage there are tons of microorganisms which secrete EPS (Extracellular Polymeric Substances) to form zoogloea granules which can absorb and degrade organic molecules in high efficiency. And this gave us inspirations to explore information related to activated sludge to make our project more feasible in realistic. Finally, we planned to use HMBR as our reactor, which combined advantages of both activated sludge and biofilm, and it can make the management more efficient.
Here’s our record for this interview