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From 2012.igem.org

Project Abstract

Our project's goal is creating E.coli to resolve formaldehyde.
Formaldehyde is a toxic substance that exists close around our lives (cf. agricultural chemicals, antiseptics in hospital, paint of building materials, etc.) and effects negatively on human body even at a relatively low concentration. Moreover, mass production of formaldehyde is done at many factories these days. So it could easily happen that formaldehyde flows out environment over its permissible amount. In fact, an over limit concentration of formaldehyde was detected from Tone River and became a hot topic in Japan (May, 2012).In these points, we make a goal to create E.coli with ability to detoxification. E.coli has a small amount of formaldehyde dehydrogenase. And this enzyme change formaldehyde to formic acid. E.coli has an enzyme too to change formic acid to hydrogen and carbon dioxide. Thesefore, we plan to overexpress these two enzymes in E.coli. The degrading process by the 2 enzymes follows the formula below.

Formaldehyde HCHO -> Formic acid HCOOH -> CO2 + H2O

There are several reasons why we use E.coli for detoxifying formaldehyde. First, cultivating E. coli can easily do mass production of the degrading enzymes. Second, this system can be industrially applied. For example, if an Apotosis function is attached to an E. coli that detoxifies formaldehyde, it can be used to purify particular contaminated environments and also tap water. Moreover, hydrogen is obtained as a degradation product of formic acid. Since hydrogen is expected as a new clean energy for fuel cell, it will also be a great industrial development if its recovery becomes possible from our formaldehyde degrading system by E. coli.

Human and Safety

On July 11, 2012, our team made a lecture at the career guidance to the 9th graders of Minamitama Metropolitan Secondary School. We described our project and activities of iGEM in the lecture and caught many interests about synthetic biology and iGEM from the future researchers. In the one-hour lecture, we talked broadly about of our campus life and then focused on iGEM as an activity example. However, the students had no basic knowledge of synthetic biology. Therefore, began with catchy topics, used easy words besides technical terms and used more figures and illustrations besides long explanations to make the whole lecture more understandable. The reactions of the students were good. They paid good attention to our lecture and some were taking notes. The fact that iGEM is an international competition seemed to attracted their ambition. Through this short time, we believe that we were able to make notice the 9th graders that there is a science field called “synthetic biology” and that there is an international competition for synthetic biology students. We gained many attention and interests of the becoming scientists to this field and iGEM.

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