Team:Alberta/Tour

Project MycoDiesel

Our team began our project in early May, just after exams ended. The project concept was greatly deliberated but after many weeks of research and heated conversation we decided on making a biofuel from common cellulose waste products. In order to optimally use the summer, we spilt our project into four main components: growth, genetics, esterification, and human practices. As always we wanted to keep safety as a frontrunner in our project.

Why use waste? In Alberta, we have three main industries, Petroleum, Agriculture and Forestry. The agricultural and forestry sectors produce lots of by-product biomass that is mostly unused and of relatively little economic value. We wanted to be able to use the biomass created to make an economically viable, efficient biofuel. Our idea also centralized on the highly controversial food versus fuel debate, which has emerged with the common practice of using food sources, such as corn or sugar cane, to produce biofuel.

But what organisms are capable of using cellulosic biomass? We originally thought of engineering an organism to produce cellulases but after much research, realized that cellulose degradation was much more complicated than originally perceived. We decided to use an organism that nature had already optimized to degrade cellulose. We selected the filamentous fungus, Neurospora crassa, known in nature for appearing after forest fires to help with secondary succession. The task of determining growth substrates and optimizing growth conditions was given to team growth.

How to produce a biofuel? We brainstormed many ways in which biofuel could be created in an organism and decided to modify fatty acid metabolism. Our plan was to up-regulate fatty acid synthesis and down-regulate beta oxidation (fatty acid breakdown). We hoped that this would cause an excess of fatty acids to be produced in the organism, which can be esterified to produce a biodiesel. The task of making this work was given to team genetics.

We wanted to make the conversion of fatty acids into a biodiesel as efficient as possible. Team esterification dedicated many hours running test trials and working on perfecting their methodology.

We wanted the creation of our biodiesel to be simple and to eventually be able to be done on both a household and industrial scale. We created a design of a possible bioreactor and explored the implications our biodiesel would have on economies and the cost of commonly found goods. A detailed case study can be found in our human practices section as well as a variety of outreach programs we conducted with students from the Edmonton area and numerous elected government officials.

In previous years, Team Alberta developed a very efficient method of assembly under the name Genomikon. Using this fast, affordable, and simple assembly method we were able to produce 7 parts to add to the registry for use in Neurospora crassa. We also learned a variety of new protocols for use in Neurospora crassa and even made a few of our own. Our progress and the use of numerous protocols, and parts can be seen in our notebook.

Feel free to check out our achievements and a really cool video, showing our biodiesel in action. We also used a variety of social media to update the public on our progress and report our successes. Without the help of many people, our project would not be possible. Check out the list of our advisors, who helped us achieve our goals, and the list of our sponsors, who truly made our project possible.