Team:WHU-China/Human Practices/GD

The first two steps are directly determined and changed by HP, and the latter design is also completed with the help of some HP.

1.Recycle phosphorus—Bio-conveyor

Background or problem：environment problem in East Lake is mainly caused by high content of phosphorus.
Design: Considering phosphorus is also an important resource for manufacture and agriculture, we plan to build a “Bio-conveyor” to Recycle the phosphorus in the environment, making pollutant to be resource.

2.Introduction of symbiotic system

Background or problem：Later we found a flaw in the first round of design—our chassis can hardly survive in polluted water.
(1)All kinds of chemicals will influence the growth and work of our bacteria
(2)Phosphorus recycling involves PolyP dynamics, which costs a lot of energy.
Design: we turn to IHB CAS for help and learn about the symbiotic and biofilm system. After searching many papers, we decide to introduce a symbiotic biofilm system to our project, which can not only protect bacteria but also provide energy for our bacteria through photosynthesis. They are a perfect match.

3. Pathway added to stabilize the biofilm

Background or problem: Symbiotic biofilm of bacteria and algae is a very advanced technology and very suitable to our project. But there is a problem happen in not only our experiment but also research fields nowadays—the detach of two organisms and collapse of the “loose” biofilm.
Design: We thus use another pathway and use synthetic biology to solve this problem. (see our second plasmid in page design)

4.Noah’s Ark

Later we found that our system could not only recycle phosphorus but also collect other element by simply replace two CDS parts in the interface of our first pathway. Thus, we can solve similar environmental-resource problems. We then completed the whole design from pathway to symbiotic system, from hardware to modelling to make it an automatic device to perform recycling continuously. More importantly, this is a platform that many other projects can use and we decide to provide this platform. We are very excited and hope it can be a probable method to save the environment one day in the future.