Team:BUAP Mexico/Description
Motivation
Recently the Puebla’s government approved a law to ban the use of plastics package as part of several action to decrease the negative impact caused by this material. On the other hand, Mexico city (cdmx) registered the highest air pollution levels in the last ten years, leading an environmental crisis which affects states around cdmx like Puebla, guerrero, tlaxcala and morelos. At first sight, this phenomena had a negative impact just in people living in this cities, however, based on this situation we decided to look for more information about the indirect effects on the environment and living organisms. Then, we noticed that we just saw the tip of the iceberg and this phenomenon has so many negative impacts but we had special interest in the ocean acidification which is one of the most unstudied and perhaps will be the most dangerous for the marine environment in the future. Then, as students of the faculty of Biological Sciences of the BUAP we decided to try to solve this problem and we looked for different projects that would be related and we found a lot of interesting ideas, but the most remarkable were the project from NCKU Tainan and UESTC-China, they motivated us to try to solve this potentially dangerous problem at the same that we would be able to produce a beneficial material from this process. In our case we decided to produce polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB) from the molecule causing the ocean acidification, the CO2. PHB might be used like a substitute of the plastic polymer, and it has the benefit to be biodegradable and ecofriendly, supporting in this way the government's efforts to avoid the use of plastic.
Abstract
Nowadays the excessive production of CO₂ is causing a phenomenon called ocean acidification (OA) which combined with tons of plastics in the ocean are both main problems in the marine environment. Through genetically transformation, E. coli BL-21 bacterium will combine the capability of plants to get CO₂ from the marine environment (decreasing the OA) and the skill from some bacterium to degradate of vegetable waste in order to have sugar source. Both processes are vital in order to produce great pyruvate quantities to get polyhydroxybutyrate, which is used to produce bioplastics that could replace the prevailing polymer . For maintaining the Pyruvate production and photorespiration in the highest and lowest level, respectively we will design a system which works under anaerobic conditions and repress the aerobic metabolism using arcA protein and for measuring the pyruvate production we design a biosensor.
References
- Mackey, K.R.M., J.J. Morris, F.M.M. Morel, and S.A. Kranz. 2015. Response of photosynthesis to ocean acidification. Oceanography 28(2):74–91,
- Mollicaa, Nathaniel R., Guob, Weifu., Cohenb, Anne L., Huangc, Kuo-Fang., Fosterd, Gavin L., Donaldd, Hannah K and Solowe, Andrew R. (2017). Ocean acidification affects coral growth by reducing skeletal density. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Vol. 115, pp. 1754–1759).
- Godbold JA, Calosi P. 2013 Ocean acidification and climate change: advances in ecology and evolution. PhilTrans R Soc B (Vol. 368, pp. 1-5).