As part of iGEMers, our team wishes to bridge the gap between laboratories and industry. In order to obtain more information about CO₂ biofixation, we visited microalgae cultivation demonstration plant in An-Nan Campus of National Cheng-Kung University. The microalgae cultivation demonstration is a project managed by Professor Jo-Shu Chang, an expert in biofixation of CO₂ from industry using marine algae. We toured their microalgae cultivation systems, and were impressed by their idea of converting microalgae into functional products. This inspired us to synthesis commercial products from CO₂ in modified E. coli They also provided us with a wealth of knowledge about the considerations needed to design a bioreactor for utilization of CO₂ and evaluate cost effectiveness of our project. CO₂ concentration in flue gas can be as high as 20~30%, thus it is necessary for us to lower the CO₂ concentration level before entering bioreactor to increase carbon fixation efficiency. With the advices given, we modified our bioreactor design for practical application in industry.

China Steel Corporation (CSC), located at Kaohsiung, Taiwan, was founded in December 1971. With annual production (in terms of crude steel) around 10 million tons, CSC produces a range of products including plates, bars, wire rods, hot and cold rolled coils, electrogalvanized coils, electrical steel coils, hot-dip galvanized coils, and Ti/Ni-base alloy. The domestic market takes roughly 69% of CSC’s production and the exports take the remaining 31%. CSC is the largest steel company in Taiwan, enjoying more than 50% of the domestic market. Major export destinations are Mainland China (including HongKong), Japan and Southeast Asia.

After we participate in the Asia-Pacific conference, we organized some questions and made a report to china steel. We consider the implementation of industrial and make a present to CSC. We also got some feedback from them. Their point of concern is that the smoke emitted by the factory is not completely carbon dioxide, but will contain some impurities like SOx and NOx. So they asked more about whether E. coli can survive and react in this environment. In addition, they also praise our idea of removing carbon and solving the disadvantages of microalgae space. They even say that they are very supportive of young people’s ideas, and there are opportunities for cooperation in the future.

We started thinking about the growth environment that E. coli can tolerate, excess carbon dioxide concentration , SOx, NOx and even metal particles. Therefore, we want to design a system that processes metal particles and cooling gas beforehand in the factory, and recycle the used waste medium.

Dr. Ng is the mother of NCKU-iGEM team. Since the establishment of NCKU-iGEM 2016, Dr. Ng have brought synthetic biology as well as iGEM to the flashlight of NCKU campus. Dr. Ng always inspires team members by asking us some critical questions without telling us the answer directly. She gave us advice from different aspects. She initially gave us many critical suggestions during the brainstorming. Except for teaching us knowledges about synthetic biology, she always reminds us to think more about the real application of our project.

Various useful advice was given by her. She emphasized the advantage of protein production by E. coli, she also suggested us to study more on high cell density fermentation. Without her timely advice, our team cannot improve our project.

Our PI, Dr. Huang works as an assistant professor under the institute of Basic Medical Sciences in National Cheng Kung Univercity. His major field is Bacteriology, Bacteria Genetics, and Molecular Biology.

We invited Dr. Huang to attend our first presentation. During our first presentation, he provided us a lot of useful feedback and we could feel the intention of Dr. Huang. So, our team think that Dr. Huang could guide us for all our project and we wanted to invite him as our PI. Luckily, we have succeed!

From Dr. Huang's first day as our PI, he did a lots for us. Firstly, he provided us all the resources that we needed or could make us more convenient. Secondly, he gave us many ideas when we have met difficulties or junctions in our progress whether it is dry lab or wet lab. We really appreciated to what he have told and taught to us.

Our secondary PI, Professor Hashimoto Masayuki is a project assistant professor from Institute of Molecular Medicine.

The host organism in our project is E. coli. Professor Hashimoto is familiar with the genetic manipulation of E. coli, therefore we introduced our idea to him. One of his research is about the effect of carbonic anhydrase (CA) to the growth of E. coli. Since we wanted to introduce heterologous CA into the E. coli, he suggested us to consider whether it will compete with the native CA of E. coli, which might affect the function of the heterologous CA. Also, Professor Hashimoto introduced the concept of homologous recombination to us as we had the idea to insert our construction into E. coli chromosome. However, we were suggested not to do the homologous recombination due to the limited time we had.

After the discussion, we started to review journals and found out the feasibility of expressing both native and non-native CA in E. coli. We found out that there were research which expressed heterologous CA successfully. Therefore we decided to clone the CA gene into the E .coli.

This year, our project is related to carbon sequestration. Therefore, we grab the chance to discuss our idea with Professor Bieng-Zih Hsieh. Professor Bieng-Zih Hsieh is an associate professor from the Department of Resources Engineering. One of his research topics is about CO₂ sequestration, which is a topic that related to our project, the difference is he employs a physical method in this aspect, while we use a biological method.

At first, we defined our project as carbon capture. However, he introduced the idea of carbon utilization to us as he thought it is more suitable for our project. Professor Hsieh introduced some carbon capture or utilization strategies that implemented in the industry currently and suggested us to do more research on those methods. He also reminded us to compare our system with other biological approach to figure out our strength and weakness.

Prof. Chao Chung, Peng is an assistant professor of Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and International Bachelor Degree Program on Energy. He used to work in China steel corp. so he gave us a chance to contact CSC.

We met up with prof. Chung to get some suggestions which more proving our direction of our projects. Prof. Chung is proficient in energy field, different from giving us experimental technical advice, he gave us more about suggestion for action on device and ideas.

He thinks that when we look for our advantages, we can take apart each of our research processes and experimental steps, and find every possible point that is more inefficient. The benefit of the whole project is very great. For example, what kind of way we can use to let every E. coli to eat most CO₂, the way we replace our cultured E. coli. It is true that there are existing ways we can think more about how we can improve. Also, professor telled us we must be very understandable about our project, it included our advantages, disadvantages, potential threat, our whole project process, and the most optimum environment we should provide for our E. coli. The more we realized our project, we could find more possibility of development. After talking with professor, we inspired more ideas and found direction about our project more clearly.

He gave us some advice in engineering viewpoint. Therefore, we tried to rewirte a big scope of our project and defined the points that we have to fulfill.

We had an opportunity to speak with Dr. Huang Chieh-Chen from National Chung Hsing University (NCHU) in the Asia Pacific Conference, whose work includes the reverse TCA cycle of engineered carbon capturing E. coli. Upon our discussion, Dr. Huang raised the issue of the low efficiency of one of our enzymes, Rubisco and suggested that we cultured our engineered E. coli in an anaerobic condition. Since Rubisco, the ribulose-1,5-biphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase is an enzyme catalyzing the reaction of either carbon dioxide or oxygen with ribulose-1,5-biphosphate (RuBP) as the name itself suggests, putting our system in an aerobic condition would significantly lower the efficiency of capturing carbon dioxide due to the similarities between gaseous carbon dioxide and oxygen.

We had an opportunity to speak with Dr. Huang Chieh-Chen from National Chung Hsing University (NCHU) in the Asia Pacific Conference, whose work includes the reverse TCA cycle of engineered carbon capturing E. coli. Upon our discussion, Dr. Huang raised the issue of the low efficiency of one of our enzymes, Rubisco and suggested that we culture our engineered E. coli in an anaerobic condition. Since Rubisco, the ribulose-1,5-biphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase is an enzyme catalyzing the reaction of either carbon dioxide or oxygen with ribulose-1,5-biphosphate (RuBP) as the name itself suggests, putting our system in an aerobic condition would significantly lower the efficiency of capturing carbon dioxide due to the similarities between gaseous carbon dioxide and oxygen.

Prof. Jo-Shu Chang was under a lot of specialties of Biochemical Engineering, Microalgae Biotechnology, CO2 reutilization, Circular Economy, Biomass Energy, Environmental Biotechnology, Applied Microbiology. He complete a microalge carbon utilization system in ANAN Campus of NCKU which helped the largest energy company in Taiwan (CPC, Taiwan) and Taiwan's No.2 CO₂ emission company (China Steel Co.) to develop the research platform of microalgae-based flue gas CO₂ biofixation technology.Besides, Since 2009, Prof. Chang served as the PI of National Energy Program (NEP) projects and focused on microalgae-based CO₂ capture and utilization for biofuels production and biorefinery.

Our project is to reuse the carbon dioxide emitted from the industry with a biological way. Although the pathway of carbon flow in E. coli and in microalge are quite different, it is really important for us to understand the current method of biological carbon utilization before we begin our research. We want to deeply understand the whole microalgae culture pool system including the position of CO₂ pipeline, downstream process, pool cleaning and how is the progress of an research in lab turning into real application.What's more, we He subsequently proposed a 'zero emission' biohydrogen system integrating unit operation of cellulose hydrolysis, darkfermentation, photofermentation, microalgae CO₂ fixation, microbial fuel cell and hydrogen fuel cell.

Prof. Chang let us visit how his project work in ANAN campus(link). Prof. Chang's team has been working with China Steel Co. and CPC, Taiwan to develop innovative microalgae-based flue gas CO2 reduction and biofuels production technologies. Therefore, they shared the progress of the whole technologies coming out. From the beginning, Prof. Chang was focus on the conversion of biomass feedstock and waste materials to energy. Large scale microalgae cultivation plants were constructed in China Steel Co. and on An-Nan campus of NCKU.

We visited Prof. Jo-Shu Chang discussing about our carbon capture system. We had a great time talk and he gave us three advises. One is to define the velocity of CO2 input in which scale of CO2 we want to solve with. Another one is to confirm a commercial product like proteins which can bring us some income to balance the cost. The last one is to calculate the whole carbon balance from the source of xylose to the process of waste. We were really appreciated that we can have a short meeting with prof. Chang.

Dr. Veerabhadran Ramanathan is a Distinguished Professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, and UNESCO Professor of Climate and Policy at TERI University, New Delhi, India. Dr. Ramanathan discovered the greenhouse effect of halocarbons, particularly, CFCs in 1975.

He has won many prestigious awards, such as the Volvo Prize, the Rossby Prize and the Tyler Prize, the highest rated environmental award given in the United States. In 2013 he was awarded the United Nations Top Environmental Prize.

He was invited to share his thought about climate change in NCKU as the 2018 Tang Laureate for sustainability science. Using the topic ‘Bending the Curve’, he would like to raise the public awareness on climate change issue. His speech inspired us a lot, he not only introduced the idea of super pollutants such as HFCs, CH4 and black carbon, but also proposed the solutions for tackling climate change.

After his speech, we briefly introduced our project to him. Although his work focuses on the impact of non-CO2 gases on climate change, he thinks that human beings need more alternative to tackle carbon dioxide emission problem, and our project may be one of the solutions, which makes us have faith in our project. He was glad to know that university students worked hard to deal with this issue.

Through this meetup, we realized that ‘everyone is responsible to make the world better, no one should be excluded.’ Unity of the entire society is the most effective way to mitigate climate change. Therefore, we put more effort in our human practice activity by engaging with government entities, local enterprise, institution and the public.

During the meetup, we asked her some problem about our robot that we have met in this morning and she answered us that there are still some components being shipped so hopefully we could wait until those components to arrive. For the software problem, she build a forum for all the iGEM teams which got the robot so that we could discuss online or sharing all kinds of protocol with each other.

We also briefly introduce our project but since we don't have too much time so she can only suggested us to study more related topic of iGEM. She is willing to have next video meeting with us and expertly we could show her our device next time. We were so glad to have this talk that day .

We have a video meeting with Tec-Monterrey. After introducing our project to them, they had pointed out some aspects that we need to think more about. They remind us to think about our end product which can make our project more complete.

During the meeting, we came out with the idea to collaborate with each other. Their project has two part. The main part is E-coding, which use bacteria to record the data. Another part is to sense the pollutant in river of Mexico, which is the part that we could link our work. We had constructed a pH alert system for low pH sensing, they suggest us to incorporate our ph sensing construct in their pollutant sensing system, making it to become more complete.

We have a nice talk with members from Tec Chihuahua. First, we introduce our project to each other.

During our talk, we receive many useful recommendations and advices especially for our constructions and cost of our main device. The considering these aspects which also leads us to more focus on the value of our project to be applied on the industries sides. Eventually, as we are communicating for our main ideas and project, we found that Tec Chihuahua seems to have a great ideas on solving the problem of larvae-killing bacteria. According to researchers, the extinction of bee will also lead the human society to face the acute problem which is the shortage of food sources. By considering this knotty dilemma, team Tec Chihuahua have outcome this with the technologies of synthetic biology. In addition, we also give our suggestion such as constructing a control system on their project so that there will be an awareness on the shortage of material or overusing of their materials.