Team:Brown-Stanford/PowerCell/Introduction

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== '''Introduction''' ==
== '''Introduction''' ==
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Before bringing synthetic organisms to do work on Mars, one needs to answer the question of what to feed the cultures. Bringing media and nutrients from the Earth to supply large-scale bioreactors is slow and inefficient. PowerCell is a cellular energy generator engineered with blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) to fix atmospheric N2 and CO2 and export them to other cells.  When grown alongside synthetic Escherichia coli, these highly compatible “power plant” cells will fuel the generation of useful products such as medicine, heat, food, and other necessities. Our project aims to prove that cyanobacteria co-cultured with E. coli can become a self-sustaining system.
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Mars introduces a number of challenges that must be overcome before a human colony can be established.  We believe that cellular engineering will address these problems in time, but this solution raises a problem of its own--the burden imposed by synthetic systems raises the already significant metabolic requirements of these organisms. It may be feasible to draw from a stored cache of growth nutrients for some time, but the basic requirements must be extracted from in situ resources if a colony is to persist in a self-sustained manner.
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PowerCell is our solution to this unavoidable obstacle; by engineering cyanobacteria to excrete sugar compounds photosynthesized from atmospheric CO2, PowerCell will provide other bacterial cultures with a complex carbon source, a basic requirement for biomass and synthetic compound production.  In addition, our cyanobacterial system is able to fix atmospheric N2 and release it in a form accessible to bacteria, providing a basic requirement for protein synthesis and other crucial biological functions.   
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[[File:Brown-Stanford InvA.png|center|400px]]
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By producing two of the macromolecules essential to bacterial growth, PowerCell will form a metabolic foundation for the biological systems which will eventually enable Martian colonization.  Other biological systems producing oxygen, heat, food, light, and other necessities will follow, and in time, a complete biogenic life support system will be assembled, all fueled by PowerCell.
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Revision as of 22:00, 17 August 2011

Brown-Stanford
iGEM

Introduction

Mars introduces a number of challenges that must be overcome before a human colony can be established. We believe that cellular engineering will address these problems in time, but this solution raises a problem of its own--the burden imposed by synthetic systems raises the already significant metabolic requirements of these organisms. It may be feasible to draw from a stored cache of growth nutrients for some time, but the basic requirements must be extracted from in situ resources if a colony is to persist in a self-sustained manner. PowerCell is our solution to this unavoidable obstacle; by engineering cyanobacteria to excrete sugar compounds photosynthesized from atmospheric CO2, PowerCell will provide other bacterial cultures with a complex carbon source, a basic requirement for biomass and synthetic compound production. In addition, our cyanobacterial system is able to fix atmospheric N2 and release it in a form accessible to bacteria, providing a basic requirement for protein synthesis and other crucial biological functions. By producing two of the macromolecules essential to bacterial growth, PowerCell will form a metabolic foundation for the biological systems which will eventually enable Martian colonization. Other biological systems producing oxygen, heat, food, light, and other necessities will follow, and in time, a complete biogenic life support system will be assembled, all fueled by PowerCell.


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