Team:BJRS China/Demonstrate

Demonstrate

Overview

  The aim of our project is to increase the oxygen carrying capacity of engineering bacteria. Previous work have shown that the expression of bacterial Vitreoscilla hemoglobin (VHb) can help bacteria utilize oxygen more efficiently[1]. However, the bacterial cell membrane makes efficient hemoglobin-oxygen contact a challenge. Based on this, our team designed a VHb surface display system to express VHb on the outermost shell of the bacteria to raise the hemoglobin-oxygen contacting efficiency. We named this system OxygenMAX system.

  Firstly, we conducted a model to predict the effect of VHb expressing and the gathering of oxygen by VHb on the growth rate of bacteria, which came out that the surface display of VHb can help the bacteria grow faster in theory.

  We found three kind of surface display system respectively are INP, intimin and autotransporter. We linked fluorescent protein to them separately to check if they work by the cell lysis experiment and the microscope examination, and our results suggested that all the three surface display system work.

  Finally we conducted the growth curve measurement experiment to see if our oxygenMAX system worked. From the result we can see that the VHb surface displayed bacteria grew faster than the wildtype bacteria on the the exponential phase.

Therefore, we believe that our project can reach the medal requirement of demonstration. For more details please see our modeling page and results page.