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Team:LMU-Munich/Application/Filtration tour
The LMU-Munich team is exuberantly happy about the great success at the World Championship Jamboree in Boston. Our project Beadzillus finished 4th and won the prize for the "Best Wiki" (with Slovenia) and "Best New Application Project".
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Application for our Sporobeads: Filtration
Our Sporobeads can express proteins on their outer coats to bind specific molecular targets. Such targets include heavy metals, toxins, and plastic.
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One example of such a filtering protein could be a CPX-Sporobead. [http://partsregistry.org/wiki/index.php/Part:BBa_I728500 CPX] is a peptide developed by the 2007 MIT iGEM team, which is extremely hydrophilic, and thus capable of binding microparticles of polystyrene from water. The excessive use of disposable plastic and the lack of universal recycling programs has led to the [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22610295 pollution of the world's oceans]. In the ocean, large pieces of plastic litter are ground by sea currents and degraded by UV radiation into microscopic pieces, so called "plastic plankton," which is consumed by fish, filter feeders, and other marine organisms. Such plastic uptake can lead to poisoning, sterility and death.
CPX-Sporobeads in huge filter boxes could be put into place to mechanically filter microscopic plastic particles out of the water. Such specific filtration would be superior to blanket filtration systems, which also remove living phytoplankton important to ocean ecosystems. To prevent the beads from being released into the sea and to ensure the plastic be removed from the water, the Sporobeads could be attached to membranes in the filter boxes. Then the Sporobeads would need to not only display CPX but also a membrane binding protein on their surface.
