Team:WHU-China/HP/Gold Integrated
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.
Modeling
To make our project can be used indeed in the future, we must have bidirectional conversation with wastewater treatment plants, our potential users. In fact, we keep in touch with Longwangzui wastewater treatment plant for a long time. This wastewater treatment plant is very important in Wuhan and undertakes quite a big task for wastewater treatment. Above all, after rebuilding last year, they began to take biological methods to purify sewage, which is exactly accordant to our project. In the process of communication, we also questioned about some useful information in wastewater treatment, including treatment data for modeling, like the oxygen content, temperature, PH in the wastewater and so on, which we referred to in our modeling part.
Design
We also consulted some specialist of synthetic biology. From June 7th to 8th, WHU-IGEM members went to Shenzhen to visit the Chinese National Genebank and iCarbonX. We also exchanged views with Wang Boxiang, a professor of genetic biology in BGI. At the same time, he put out some corresponding advice which enlightened us a lot. He reminded us of making some creative designs to make our project more related to synthetic biology. So we decided to search information and made several designs such as the enhancement of the expression of B12 in order to make our dehalogenase function better.
