Team:Hong Kong HKUST/Description
Description
From plastics to the power line.
Polyethylene is the most widely used plastic and arguably one of the most versatile materials to ever be synthesized. Its practicality and convenience however, have come at a great environmental cost. Polyethylene takes millennia for photodegradation, leeching harmful microplastics into the environment. The iGEM HKUST 2018 team tries a synthetic biology approach to this pressing issue, making use of transformant E. coli engineered with genes encoding for Laccase to degrade polyethylene into smaller alkane chains. Our team recognizes the opportunity to further advance this project by addressing another key issue – energy. Using Shewanella oneidensis MR-1 strain’s inbuilt exogenous electron transport mechanism in tandem with genes responsible for alkane metabolism derived from Desulfatibacillum alkenivorans, we generate electricity from the metabolism of degraded polyethylene that we hope will one day solve the world’s growing energy needs. Thus, our project serves as an integrated effort to simultaneously solve two crucial problems.
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