Team:Kyoto/Inspiration6

Inspiration

It was really a long journey for us to decide the project theme. We held a lot of meetings, yeah, like a looooooot of meetings! But even after we decided to deal with the microplastic problem, we were too worried about whether our project was going to work because it is such a tough problem that even though huge number of researchers from all over the world are trying to establish an effective solution, they are still unable to do so. In the meetings, each of our team members proposed topics in biology which they found interesting, and we democratically discussed each of them. We brought many kinds of ideas: making sweet-tasting insects, the applied use of whey protein, the biological version of a Rube Goldberg machine, the optogenetic manipulation of translation activity, etc. However, almost all the these were too difficult to put into practice or aimed only at learning interesting methods while lacking a clear purpose.

As we were having hard time reaching consensus, our team PI advised us to identify a clear aim to help solve a relevant social problem. One of our team members had proposed the problem of fish and microplastics, which were reported to accumulate in their guts. Since this problem requires to deal with microplastic contamination in huge bodies of water such as the world’s oceans, we could not come up with any practical way to deal with it, especially if genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are required. Instead, we turned our attention to microplastics closely related to our everyday lives. Then, we came across an interesting article from 2017 on the Japanese blog "プラなし生活 Less Plastic Life" about microplastics being released from clothes during routine washing. Meanwhile, we also found several proteins shown to digest certain kinds of synthetic polymers, so at first, we thought of trying to degrade microplastics. However, many previous iGEM teams have failed to improve the efficiency of their digestion, so we decided instead to focus on another property of these proteins: to bind to plastics.

Then, we began to think, what if we could make protein-based microplastic-capturing system by applying those plastic-binding proteins? This approach is biologically safe because it is protein-based and avoids the release of GMOs into the environment.

So this is how we started to work on our strategy!

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