Team:HUBU-Wuhan/Description

Description

waster carton:

    There were 331 million packages produced during the “Double 11” in China, 50% of which were cartons. Last year, the total number of express packages in China was more than 40 billion. Some cartons of them are not well recycled, and we should pay attention to this, especially in the context of today’s increasingly tense resources and energy, because they are low-cost and of a large quantity.

Zymomonas mobilis

    Zymomonas mobilis is the only bacteria that utilizes six carbon sugar to produce ethanol through the ED pathway yet. It has high sugar utilization rate, ethanol yield and ethanol tolerance. It also can utilize pentose to produce sorbitol, bionic acid, fructosan and so on. It is a model microbial strain producing ethanol.

Isobutanol:

    Isobutanol is widely used in our life. It can be used as chemical extractant, gasoline, aviation oil, plastics and so on. It is very important that isobutanol is environment-friendly biofuel. Compared with gasoline and other alcohols, such as N-butyl alcohol and ethanol, isobutanol has its superiority in energy density, octane number and calorific number. It is more stable than other substances and has higher energy. It has much value in industrial production in the future.

(pictures come from Internet)

      Our project aims to build up biological parts in non-model bacterium Zymomonas mobilis for converting waste cartons into biofuels. Although many genetic parts have been characterized, they are mostly from and for model species with limited studies on their compatibility. Additionally, significant amount of omics data has also been accumulated but not widely utilized yet. Zymomonas mobilis is a non-model Gram-negative ethanologenic bacterium with many desirable characteristics to favor the production of lignocellulosic biofuels. In this project, a reporter-gene system for Z. mobilis was established to effectively characterize genetic parts such as promoters and RBS. Moreover, promoter strength was systematically predicted based on omics datasets. These genetic parts including their compatibility were then characterized and further utilized for building an isobutanol-production module to convert campus waste paper cartons into renewable biofuels of ethanol and isobutanol. The success of our project will not only build up a reporter-gene system, basic and composite parts for the non-model species, but also provide renewable biofuels while protecting the campus environment.