Team:UiOslo Norway/Demonstrate
Let us demonstrate
Project aim
The final goal of our project was the production of a functioning solar cell sensitized to different wavelengths by bacterial production of different pigments, especially lycopene. But before we could consider our project a success we had two major milestones to complete: engineer bacteria to produce pigments and manufacture a solar cell with the genetically-modified bacteria that produces electricity.
Milestones
After a lot of work our cells have finally made lycopene, so much you can even see it! With this we have our first major milestone and only need to refine the biological component before we are ready to submit our part to the registry and get on to the best part of our project, building the solar cell itself. To show off our new red cells we put them beside our uninduced cells and cells with an empty pBAD vector, ones that are both induced and uninduced.
E. soli and his (uninduced) parents (left to right: pBAD induced, pBAD uninduced, CrtEBI induced, CrtEBI uninduced)
We are happy to report that we have managed to transform E. coli (or perhaps we should say E. soli) into a system that has the potential to produce large amounts of lycopene following induction. We hope you'll enjoy this photo of our colleague Simen that proves our cellular success, at least as much as we did.
E. soli got his red colour just in time to move out and into his new home where he is the main character. Hopefully, his business will be a big success. By being red, he will be able to absorb more wavelengths of light and produce more electricity in the same space, giving the world a way to be greener!
It took a while of brainstorming, talking to experts, looking at different solar cell designs and changing parameters, before we finally settled on a design that was simple enough to build off of, but still had all the parts needed to function (at least long enough to run our tests). The solar cell was designed to be small enough that we could make as many as we needed with the material we had.
In the end, we got E. soli all set up in his new home and ready to work! The little solar cell showed that it could produce a bit of voltage (~220mV) from sunlight and really got our project going. We hope it will pave the way for bigger and better things to come.
The first solar cells we built were not working the way we wanted them to. After some failed attempts at building the solar cell, changing simple parts in the design as we went, we started to figure out some possible errors.
Carefully spreading the cell paste evenly, allowing the paste to dry slowly over time, and ensuring that the graphite covers the entire bottom plate and has not damaged the ITO coating; all of these changes and precautions aided in getting the cell up and running.