Project

iGEM UT-Tokyo

Background

Microorganisms are of critical importance in our ecosystems since they play a roll of natural decomposer. If it were not for microbes, the earth might become awash with fallen leaves, dead bodies and other debris. Bioremediation is an idea of expanding this bacterial property to environmental use; in other words, bacterial soldiers removing pollutants. As this strategy can exploit the specialty of biology, it surpasses in some points precedent physical/chemical remediation.

Conventional bioremediation, however, has one weak point; it takes enormous time to complete the work.

Synthetic biology has made it possible to create microorganisms that are specialized for bioremediation, thereby paved the way for bioremediation with high efficiency. In the past iGEM competitions, quite a few teams have developed devices for bioremediation. Most of the projects focused on how to deal with substrates (collection, reduction, etc...) and did not pay much attention to the efficiency of the system.

However, we predict that these devices require very high concentration of substrates and/or microorganisms to work effectively enough.

To solve this problem, we designed a "Self-Mustering with Aspartate-Responsive Taxis (SMART) System." The basic strategy of the SMART system is quite simple. "The higher the concentration of microorganisms around substrate, the better the efficiency of bioremediation." Take a look at two movies below, and you will see microorganisms decompose the substrate much faster with SMART system. From this simulation, we could say that ... (graphs and some other data needed, under construction.)

In short, SMART system is designed in such a way so it is applicable to allow bioremediation of various substrates with good efficiency.

In the System page, we will introduce details of our SMART system.