Establishing the Algae-Connection
Our Human Practices
As part of our human practice projects we decided to focus on two things. First and foremost, we wanted to collect as much know-how as possible, about algae cultivation and the potential green algae have. This is why we visited various experts and exchanged ideas about our project. In the following texts we outlined what we learned and how we applied the collected know how in our project. Secondly: For most people, science happens behind walls of big institutes or universities. Most of them see scientists on TV news or movies, but what is actually happening in the lab? To close this gap between scientists and public we organized several events to show what we are doing. Here we presented our ideas and visions, talked about synthetic biology and answered upcoming questions. Read more here: Education & Engagement
All we had to do to get inspired and improve our idea was gathering as much know-how as possible - so we sat together with scientists and companies and tried to implement their knowledge in our experimental set-up.
Green Week
This year the International „Green Week” took place in Berlin from January 18-27. The Green Week is an exhibition dealing with renewable resources, organic agriculture, gardening and food industry. With over thousand exhibitors with more than 100,000 products from all over the world, the green week affords the possibility of collecting information about seminal products and technologies and the exchange with interesting personalities. On the exhibition we met multiple organisations dealing with great world problems like environmental pollution, worldwide hunger, exploitation and child poverty. The Upcycling program “trashy bag” of the humanitarian organisation “PLAN International”, where women use old plastic bags to produce new bags, inspired us to do our own upcycling workshop with children (read here about our upcycling workshop). We also met Jörg Ullmann, who is the owner of an algae farm in Germany, Klötze and an expert in alga cultivation who invited us to visit him at his farm (read more about our visit at the algae farm below).We visited the presentation about microplastic with its risks and current research situation organized by the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR). We retrieved a lot of new information and had the chance to discuss this with experts and scientists.
Algae Farm Kloetze ALGOMED®
“The most important lungs of our planet are our oceans -
every second oxygen molecule we inhale is produced by algae”
This is why Joerg Ullmann, the owner of one of the biggest algae farms in Europe, is still fascinated by algae and has worked with them for more than 15 years. We visited him at his farm to understand how algae can be cultivated on such a big scale. Here he grows Spirulina and Chlorella which then can be processed, for example to food and cosmetic products. As we built a bioreactor for C. reinhardtii as well, it was very important to exchange ideas. We learned that not every algae needs the same cultivation and that there is not just one perfect way to cultivate algae in general. Every species is different in its demands - this is why we had to experiment how chlamy can be cultivated best.
MINT Microalgae Engineering
Algae can be cultivated in many different ways, which is why we tried to meet up with a variety of companies working with green algae.
MINT Enginnering focuses on the urban farming segment and creates bioreactors suitable for every kind of facades. Gunnar Muehlstadt, CEO of MINT, emphasized that the cultivation and the actual degradation of plastic by Chlamydomonas should happen in two different reactors.
During our meeting we also learned about the costs of cultivation and what kind of material we probably need. Moreover he offered us to test our algae on a larger scale with his systems, once our bioreactor is finished.
Dr. Ralf Steuer, cofounder of CellDeg GmbH
As cofounder of CellDeg (a Berlin based start up for high density cultivation devices of algae), Dr. Ralf Steuer is an expert in phototrophic cultivation to whom we referred for tips on how to increase the protein yields from our engineered Chlamydomonas strains. He leads the research group Metabolic Network Analysis at the Institute of Theoretical Biology. Dr. Steuer taught us many things that were important for our project. He gave us advice on realizing the cultivation setup and helped us understand some of the many possibilities and details while cultivating photosynthetically active organisms.
Besides sensitizing us to the metabolic needs of an algae culture he most importantly helped us to understand what parameters are important while cultivating photosynthetic organisms. With his help and our developed model, we arrived at the conclusion that we should cultivate C. reinhardtii in a thin bioreactor, resulting in a higher algae density and a higher density of the enzymes it secretes. This would maximize the degradations efficiency. This is why we constructed our bioreactor using a flat-panel, for more information read:
Designing and building a bioreactor.
ResearchGate
ResearchGate is a social network, created for scientists all over the world. The platform allows researchers, students, and everyone who is interested, to connect with scientists, to exchange papers and to stay on track about the latest publications. Luckily, we were invited to talk about our project at the ResearchGate office in Berlin. Here, we met people from different professional and academic backgrounds working on the scientific knowledge transfer across disciplines and social groups. By talking to project management specialists, we learned how to streamline the processes of creating tasks, assigning due dates and responsible team members to them and how to finish these by their respective deadlines.
Wastewater Treatment Plant Ruhleben/Berlin
To understand how our local water gets filtered and cleaned we reached out to one of the six wastewater treatment plants in Berlin. We were told that 97% of all substances in wastewater get filtered while the remaining 3%, including microplastic particles, stay in the treated water.
This is why we discussed the possibilities of using modified C. reinhardtii as last filtration step to degrade remaining plastic particles. During our guided tour we learned that a part of the water (once it ran through all filtration steps) gets treated with UV-radiation to eliminate last remaining harmful substances. We let Chlamy grow on taken water samples that was treated with UV-radiation and one without.
For more read here: Cultivation Experiments
Tobias Gerhardt, GNF e.V.
It's easy to accept the facts that are told, but we were interested our self wether we could visualize the amount of microplastic that remains even after waste water filtration and decontamination. That is why we teamed up with Tobias Gerhardt from GNF e.V., who developed a visual marker for microplastic. As his assay is still under development, we can not go much into detail about the chemical components used, unfortunately. We brought our previously collected water samples from Ruhleben (with varying water cleanliness) for an analysis, 20 ml each. Following an incubation period we had our first peak at the results. Even after the water had passed every cleaning step, microplastic particles could still be found in this assay indicating that even though there are established cleaning methods in place they still are not sufficient. This underlines the need for new solutions and the potential that a Chlamy-based wastewater cleaning step has for a long-term conservation of clean water.
Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen
Microplastic and Chlamy - A story of romance
To improve the degradation of microplastic, we were looking for a way to bring Chlamy and our microplastic closer together. During our research we discovered the work of Dr. Bäumchen and his colleagues at Max Planck Institut Göttingen. The group investigated the flagella-mediated adhesion of Chlamydomonas on several surfaces. We reached out to Dr. Bäumchen to ask him about the adhesion properties of the flagella of Chlamy regarding PET surfaces. As the group had not performed any experiments at that point, Dr. Bäumchen was so kind to offer Darius to investigate the interaction with PET himself. During a two-week visit at the Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Darius measured the adhesion forces of the
Chlamydomonas strain SAG 11-32b on PET. He discovered that the strain showed forces up to 5 nN which is comparable to measurements done by the group. The adhesion could be deactivated by incubation under red light. With this photo-switch-ability we hope to trigger the adhesion in our favour.
Summary: Our integrated Human Practices
To find out how to design a setup in which microplastics could be degraded, we pondered two possible solutions; first, using the strain UVM4 which lacks flagella and would sediment in the secondary clarifier of a wastewater plant after degrading microplastics. To cultivate algae in an industrial scale we spoke with industrial algae producers like MINT and ALGOMED. Here we got the idea of using the PtxD gene, enabling Chlamydomonas to use phosphite as its sole phosphorus source, posing a big advantage in outdoor cultivation. The second solution is using strain SAG11-32b, which shows adhesion to PET with its flagella. To test this hypothesis we went to the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen and performed atomic-force-microscopy measurements of the adhesion forces. Finally, we worked together with cultivation experts like Dr. Ralf Steuer from our university who was a big help in finding the right approach for modeling. He also advised us to put our knowledge from human practices and theory in action to build a cultivation setup that can be used by the Synbio-community.
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