Welcome!

The University of Calgary iGEM team aims to build a biosensor for naphthenic acids. Naphthenic acids are a family of organic acids that are toxic to terrestrial and aquatic wildlife, and are waste products of the bitumen extraction process. Naphthenic acids are stored in on-site settling ponds called tailing ponds; not only do naphthenic acids harm the environment, they also contribute to the corrosion of refinery equipment, which directly increases maintenance and replacement costs. Currently, sophisticated and expensive procedures such as mass spectroscopy and gas chromatography are needed to identify and assess the concentration of naphthenic acids in solution. A bacterial sensor, if developed, could greatly improve the cost- and time-efficiency of naphthenic acid detection, and facilitate a workable approach for remediation.

Our Naphthenic Acid Biosensor

Roll over the bacterium on the right to see a more detailed description about each component of our project! Or, look over our project here!

An NA-Sensitive Promoter

The most critical component of our biosensor is a naphthenic acid sensory element. This would likely be a promoter element. The major challenge for this was that given the lack of available information on NA degradation, there was no NA sensitive promoter available in the literature for us to use. We needed to develop methods to search for such an element. These included our novel “fishing” method as well as our bioinformatics approach. Click on the promoter to learn more about this!

An Electrochemical Reporter

We need a reliable reporter for our system. Given the highly variable and often turbid nature of oil sands tailings ponds however, we needed a special kind of reporter. We chose to use the lacZ gene, but characterize it as an electrochemical reporter. Click the gene to learn more!

A Suitable Chassis

We need a chassis in which to house our system. Given that we intended to get our sensory element from either Pseudomonas or microalgae, and that these organisms are both naturally present within tailings ponds, we chose to focus on them. As such, we contributed and characterized several parts for future work in microalgae, and to move plasmids efficiently from E. coli to Pseudomonas. Click the chassis to learn more!

The Vision: A Naphthenic Acid Biosensor

We plan to create a relatively small, cheap biosensing device that can respond to naphthenic acids and produce an electrochemical output. Roll over the individual parts for more details.