Using Nature to Solve Man-made Problems. The Facts Huge environmental problem Polyethylene—most...
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Transcript of Using Nature to Solve Man-made Problems. The Facts Huge environmental problem Polyethylene—most...
Using Nature to Solve Man-made Problems
The Facts
Huge environmental problem
Polyethylene—most common plastic
Biodegradable plastic CO2 emission
Traditional Methods of Degradation Sunlight, moisure, oxygen, and composting
Previous Studies
Convert polystyrene into a biodegradable plastic
Previous Studies
Sphingomonas bacteria and Pseudomonas eat polyethylene
Previous Studies
What We Could Do
Crazy Reengineering
Sphingomonas bacteria so they both degrade the plastic and take up the CO2 released during degradation
Interesting• Scaling up
• Increase the degradation rate
• • Address the CO2
emission problem
Safe Basic research
focusing on the biochemical pathway in Sphingomonas and Pseudomonas bacteria that help them eat plastic
Good IGEM Project?
Applicable
Borderlines Energy
Reasonable Size
Surprisingly Little has been done
Sources
http://www.reusablebags.com/ http://news.therecord.com/article/354044 http://www.ucd.ie/cscb/main_pages/news/news010306.htm http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=5844268&page=1 http://www.degradable.net/how/in_detail.shtml http://genome.jgi-psf.org/draft_microbes/novar/novar.home.htm http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16649270