Team:TU Delft/Safety

From 2010.igem.org

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     <li><strong>Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of:
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         <li> researcher safety, </li>
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         <li> public safety, or </li>
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        <li> environmental safety? </li>
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    <li><strong> Do any of the new BioBrick parts (or devices) that you made this year raise any safety issues? If yes,
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        <li> did you document these issues in the Registry? </li>
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        <li> how did you manage to handle the safety issue? </li>
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        <li> How could other teams learn from your experience? </li>
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    <li><strong>Is there a local biosafety group, committee, or review board at your institution? </strong>
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             <li> If yes, what does your local biosafety group think about your project? </li>
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     <li><strong>Do you have any other ideas how to deal with safety issues that could be useful for future iGEM competitions? How could parts, devices and systems be made even safer through biosafety engineering? </strong></li>
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Revision as of 13:50, 16 July 2010


 

Our Project

ProjectPic.jpg

This year the TU Delft team will take a more worldly approach by making an attempt on improving the environment by creating biobricks that will facilitate hydrocarbon degradation in aqueous environments. See our project description or follow us on our blog.


TU Delft iGEM Team 2010

I-GEM TU 2010-08-26 32.jpg

We've got our team together! 9 undergraduate students of the Delft Technical University have cleared their schedules until (at least) September in order to work on iGEM. Most of us have backgrounds in Life Sciences and Biotechnology, but we also have a Bioinformatician on our side. Besides Synthetic Biology we also share a passion for playing music. Want to get to know us? Have a look at our team page

Media attention

IGEMTUDELFT2010Nightofthenerds.PNG
TU Delft DSC4826.jpg
TU Delft Pieter.jpg

The iGEM TU Delft team is getting more and more popular!

2010-10-09: Eva & Nadine in the Dutch national newspaper 'Volkskrant' Read here (dutch)

2010-06-17: A short video was recorded about our team and synthetic biology by Nanopodium, a platform for exchanging thoughts, ideas, opinions and best practices on nanotechnology. The video is coming soon on youtube, to read more on Nanopodium itself, click here

2010-06-16: iGEM TU Delft on Dutch national TV (NOS news)! Watch here in Dutch and here with English subtitles.

2010-06-16: Dutch national radio. Listen here, or go to the NOS news item.

2010-05-27: The TU Delta, a weekly magazine of the Delft Technical University, published an article about our team. You can find the article here

Oil Sands Initiative

Our project is sponsored by a grant from Oil Sands Initiative. We are grateful to the following sponsors:

==Blog== Follow our progress day by day via our blog. Also don't forget to become a fan of our Facebook page or follow us on Twitter.

Calendar

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Today's post

  1. Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of:
    • researcher safety,
    • public safety, or
    • environmental safety?
  2. Do any of the new BioBrick parts (or devices) that you made this year raise any safety issues? If yes,
    • did you document these issues in the Registry?
    • how did you manage to handle the safety issue?
    • How could other teams learn from your experience?
  3. Is there a local biosafety group, committee, or review board at your institution?
    • If yes, what does your local biosafety group think about your project?
    • If no, which specific biosafety rules or guidelines do you have to consider in your country?
  4. Do you have any other ideas how to deal with safety issues that could be useful for future iGEM competitions? How could parts, devices and systems be made even safer through biosafety engineering?

 

Background

Dissolved oil molecules in (waste) water are a serious threat to our ecosystem. One liter of oil pollutes 1,000,000 liters of drinking water. Chemicals are usually used to deal with this problem, however they often contribute to the problem instead of the solution. The iGEM team of this year builds on this global problem and seeks solutions from nature. Some organisms possess genetic properties that enable them to process oil in salty environments. The team will develop biobricks containing these attributes and implement them into E.coli. In this way we can contribute to the development of new bioremediation technologies by creating a bacterium that can purify water contaminated with oil.


Project Description

This year's TU Delft team will be working on the biological conversion of hydrocarbons in aqueous environments, e.g. biological degradation of oil particulates in oil sands tailing waters. The project addresses one of the more considerable challenges in this branch of industry. Addressing the issue through a biological means will require an interdisciplinary approach. The broad range of scientific fields to which we have been exposed throughout our studies will provide the knowledge and experience to formulate an efficient solution for this issue. Besides competing in iGEM, the team also wants to contribute to future research into oil utilization and create new possibilities for sustainable developments in the fossil fuel industry.

The members of the TU Delft team carry a broad range of multidisciplinary assets, but it should be noted that there is a large focus on wet lab work, due to the large number of students from Life Science and Technology. This study is collaboration of two top universities in the Netherlands, the Leiden University (molecular genetics and medicine) and the Technical University of Delft ((bio-)chemical and process engineering), combining fundamental research and applied sciences.

The basis of the 2010 TU Delft iGEM team's project is the generation of a biological chassis for the conversion of hydrocarbons. The conversion system will be implemented and characterized using the well-studied cellular environment of Escherichia coli, the workhorse for genetic and metabolic engineering. To tackle the important aspects faced when using biological systems for oil utilization, we are focusing on the following features:

  • Conversion of hydrocarbons

The aerobic alkane conversion pathways of medium and long chain (<C36) alkanes from Gordonia sp. TF6 and Geobacillus thermodenitrificans will be the basis of our parts. These pathways will be implemented using the BioBrick principle and characterized in detail with respect to single enzyme activities and affinity. Using these measurements the efficiency of different enzymes can easily be compared.

  • Hydrocarbon tolerance

Hydrocarbons are known to damage the cell membrane and some essential cell proteins. It was found that organisms which are naturally hydrocarbon tolerant produce chaperons and other proteins, which maintain the cellular activity. We will implement this type of hydrocarbon by generating the respective BioBricks.

  • Hydrocarbon solubility

An engineering challenge faced in oil bio-conversions is the low solubility of hydrophobic molecules in water. In order to overcome this mass‐transfer limitation we will clone two genes encoding for proteins with emulsifying properties. It is expected that these proteins will increase the solubility of hydrocarbons, which can be then converted more efficiently into potentially valuable products. Additionally, these emulsifiers are promising reagents for oil extraction from sands making the process cheaper and more sustainable.

  • Halotolerance

High salt concentrations, as can be found in tailing waters and other aqueous environments contaminated with oil, are toxic to many microorganisms. Our aim is to create a BioBrick which will facilitate cell growth at increased salt concentrations.

  • Genetic regulation

In order to have efficient cell growth, it is important to develop a system that activates gene expression at the optimal moment in time. An alkane sensing mechanism will be coupled to the 'in-house' catabolic repression system (crp) generating energy efficient cell growth under glucose conditions as well as produce enzymes for hydrocarbon degradation when needed.

  • Genome‐scale modeling

Modeling approaches are used to explore the possibilities of valuable product formation from hydrocarbons. The model will be based on the MetaCyc pathway database, which contains pathway information of many sequenced organisms, covering a broad range of products such as biofuels, bioplastics and other fine chemicals.

The tasks of the team are roughly be divided into two groups. One group will deal mainly with the aspects related to the modeling and design of the synthetic system. A second group of students will mainly carry out the wet lab work.

Also the ethical and safety issues posed by synthetic biology will be considered. The synthesis of a DNA strand representing a set of genes arbitrarily chosen by the designer, and its insertion in a living cell will, in general, provide the host cell, with new emerging properties that were not present in the original organisms. This poses several challenges in terms of safety and ethics that need to be addressed within the project.

We also presented our project in more detail for a number of faculty members, you can find this presentation here.

All registered BioBricks will be published here:

<groupparts>iGEM010 TU_Delft</groupparts>

Planning

The project can be divided into three phases:

The team members get to know each other, get a working knowledge of each other’s topic and start generating ideas.

  • Design phase

The students define the biological design which they want to carry out, together with the project specifications.

  • Production phase

The (wet-lab) realization of the system and the evaluation of its performance.

During the brainstorming phase, the involvement of the students will be part-time. There are weekly meeting to exchange ideas and discuss proposals. For the remaining 6 months covered by the actual project (May-October), the involvement of the team is full time.

Press

For more information about our project, feel free to contact us!

TU Delft iGEM Team

Phone: +31 15 278 1625

Email: info@igemtudelft.nl

Address

KLUYVERLABORATORIUM VOOR BIOTECHNOLOGIE

Julianalaan 67

2628 BC Delft

THE NETHERLANDS

Press Contact

Nadine Bongaerts - nadine@igemtudelft.nl +31 (0) 6 22 87 92 83

Pieter van Boheemen - pieter@igemtudelft.nl +31 (0) 6 14 15 32 98

Media Coverage

 

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