Ecovative (Integrated Human Practices)

To elucidate which direction our project could take, we spoke with experts from both industry and academia. From them, we have gained valuable information on how to conduct our experiments and what to look for.

Meeting with Novozymes

Early in our project we met with Mikako Sasa and Sara Landwik from Novozymes to consult experts from the industry. Their advice was to work with either Aspergillus, Schizophyllum or Fusarium. At DTU we already had Aspergillus strains, and we acquired a Schizophyllum strain from Hans Wösten. In addition to knowledge of fungal strains, they shared some ideas on which features could be interesting to engineer. For engineering the material properties of the structure, they mentioned changing the branching patterns of beta-glucan or changing the acetylation of chitin. Sadly we didn’t have the time to do this.
Lastly, they gave us advice on how to grow these filamentous fungi and how to easily transfer the fungi from liquid medium to the solid substrates.

Hyphaebox

Hyphaebox is a startup from DTU that produces packaging materials from mycotecture. They shared their expertise in growing mycotecture, including which substrates, temperatures and ambient moisture are best suited for producing high quality myco materials.
As they are a startup that focuses on design, they are interested in knowing more of the technical aspects of the materials. Therefore, they asked us to look into the effects of growing on different substrates and material properties of the products. In addition, they are interested in data from other types of fungi. They used shiitake (Lentinula edodes) for their materials and are interested in what other fungal species could be useful for production of materials.

Ecovative

An important part of our project was making bricks out of fungus and since we were not the first to take this approach, we contacted the firm Ecovative Design. They are the leading commercial manufacturer of fungal materials, and we wanted to get their input on which features they could see us targeting for our project.
One of the suggestions from Ecovative was to integrate color changes into the mycelium, either in the form of chromoproteins or pigments, as color-control could be a huge market for them. Therefore, we started on assembling a chromoprotein cassette for insertion into the filamentous fungi. We also assembled a melanin producing cassette, which could give the material a darker look. The effect of our results can be seen as two-fold; firstly, we’ve demonstrated the availability for changes of interest in chosen fungus species and secondly, the material could be made to look appealing both in regards to building materials, but also in home-decor.
Secondly, if we could control the branching pattern or the cell wall thickness, it could be a huge leap in the structural abilities of the end products. We researched the possibilities and found the gene GfaA, which synthesizes the limiting metabolite in the chitin pathway (1). In addition to these genes, we modeled the growth on fungal mycelium and its branching pattern.

In parallel to working with the genetics of the fungal engineering, we also tackled the process of protoplasting and transforming filamentous fungi. Ecovative Design shared their protoplasting protocol with us and we got to work on implementing the protocol.
During our experimentation we tried to optimize the protocol by substituting an expensive reagent, driselase, with a more affordable one. We used higher concentrations of Glucanex than originally and different digestion times instead of following the protocol with their digestion times and concentration of driselase. It was originally speculated that only Glucanex could be used, increasing the profitability of Ecovative Design. However, further research is needed as we did not successfully produce any protoplasts in any of the tries.

Snapchat takeover

We were lucky enough to be offered to take over the DTU snapchat account for one of the three days of the BioBrick Tutorial. Our vision in doing so was to primarily letting the roughly 11,000 other DTU students get an inside view of what being a member of the DTU Biobuilders means. The takeover happened before we had settled on a project, so the main focus was showing the event and bringing the audience along in the activities that took place during the tutorial. On Saturday during the iGEM Giant Jamboree, we will again take over the snapchat account and document our time in Boston - this time going a bit more in depth in communicating our project to the world. Anyone interested can follow us on the official DTU Snapchat: dtudk.