1. Academic Project
Bioscience High School: Biofuel/ Bio-panel Project (2012-2014)
Challenge Summary:
There is a lack of diverse and effective alternative fuels in our community.
The challenge of insufficient alternative fuel sources shows something about society and
its stance on creating a sustainable future. This tiny diversity that is present in my
community shows the lack of interest in the development of alternative sources. This
affects the environment and our stability as a species through the reliance on the limited
fossil fuel reserves.
The Bio-panel idea and synthetic biology
Creating the bio-panel requires:
Bacteria that will produce fuel
A source of energy to power the reactions
A way to extract the fuel
Basically there needs to be three things to create any fuel, the energy to transfer into
the bonds of each fuel molecule, tools for creating the fuel, a way to extract and store the
fuel that has been produced.
The way that our group aims to acquire these things involves the process of synthetic
biology. Synthetic biology is the new science of modifying genetic engineering practices to
encourage communication, standardization, efficiency, and economy. They focus on
creating a standard method of modifying living organisms so they can solve a problem and
be used to create molecular substances. The benefits of using these microorganisms are,
they can be used for synthesis of complex molecules that are currently hard to create, and
they can be scaled through constant culturing to produce a huge increase in population and
production.
The process of synthetic biology that we are doing uses Escherichia coli (i.e. e-coli) due
to the large basis of research that has already been done on their behavior and the effects
of modifying their genetic code.
Our project requires us to add two distinct processes to one strain of e-coli, we need
them to have the fuel production as well as a way to harness energy needed to create the
fuel. The way that we are achieving this is by adding two distinct protein coding sequences,
or strands of DNA that can be read and transcribed into proteins- these two pieces are put
into small circular DNA vectors called plasmids, these vectors allow the bacterial cell to read
them and use the DNA that they contain to generate proteins.
2. Once these proteins are created they can be used by the cell to perform an action, in
our case its two actions, one is taking sunlight and using the energy gained from that to
power the cells natural energy production process. The second part is the creation of two
enzymes that take sugars and rearrange them into ethanol molecules along with some
other byproducts.
On a larger scale we can take this bacteria and grow it in a plate, expose that plate to
sunlight and provide a simple sugar for the bacteria to digest into ethanol, then harvest that
ethanol and find a source to use the fuel in.
The process of solar powering that the cells do once we add our solar protein DNA
sequence into could possibly be modified to produce hydrogen instead of powering the cells
respiration, this would require less work to develop multiple plasmids and also create an
easier way to harvest the fuel. The normal process for creating solar powered cells is to add
this solar protein and kill off part of the respiration chain that uses energy to push H+ ions
outside the cell and replacing it with a protein that takes solar energy and does the same
thing. If we leave this original protein in place and add the solar protein, there would be a
buildup of hydrogen outside the cell and if the extracellular matrix got saturated with this
hydrogen it would start to precipitate out of the solution where we could capture and store
it.
So the outcome would be similar, but instead of having the cells that are exposed to
light producing ethanol that we would have to extract, we could have the cells produce
hydrogen and capture the gas somehow. This would also have the benefits of scaling with
bacterial population growth as well as being safer to create than electrolysis; there’s no
need for the electrolytes or the electric power source.
