Team:ZJU-China/Project/

After a terribly long time of brainstorm and discussion, we're more than happy to finalize our this year's project on synthetic biofilm. Biofilm formation has been a great headache for biologists, as it's involved in many infectious diseases and is resistant to antibiotics. In previous iGEM projects on biofilm, focuses are mostly on biofilm elimination. However, as we delve into the world of biofilm system, we're amazed by the heterogeneity developed naturally in biofilm which is similar to differentiation in higher organisms. Therefore, instead of making biofilm an enemy, we're taking a rather opposite approach to make most of what nature has offered us.

Biofilm structure serves as a natural diffusion system, where chemical gradients such as oxygen are automatically established. Microbes in biofilm are physiologically stratified with the depth of biofilm and can be engineered to express different functions in response to the gradient. This can have great application potential in many fields. Biofilm formed by engineered microbes can be an ideal bioreactor system for biofuel production and environment bioremediation, where substrates can be catalyzed and processed down efficiently from layer to layer, greatly expediting reaction rates. The natural diffusion system of biofilm would also make engineered biofilm a more advanced biosensor, the detection range of which can be greatly enlarged for more practical real world application.

As biofilm experiments are new to us, we're currently taking great efforts to build the whole system for experiments. Though our project is still in its infancy, we do have big plans ahead. We intend to first build a stratified expression system in biofilm, a module extensible for bioreactor systems, such as in cellulose degradation and ethanol production. We'd then explore its implementation in generating a new generation of biosensors, which could tolerate heavy metal of a much higher concentration. More details and experiment data will be timely updated with each step we make.