Difference between revisions of "Team:OLS Canmore AB CA"

We are the "Our Lady of The Snows Catholic Academy - OLS" team from Canmore, Alberta, Canada. Our project aims to break down hair in wastewater treatment facilities, and to break down feathers in the poultry industry.

Our plan is to genetically engineer E.coli K12 to express keratinase—an enzyme that breaks down the protein keratin, found in feathers and hair. We will use the KeratinaseA(KERA) and KeratinaseUS(KERUS) genetic sequences found naturally in the Bacillus genera. The KERA and KERUS sequences will be optimized for expression in E.coli, synthesized into plasmid rings, and ligated into a standard biobrick backbone for submission to the iGEM parts registry. It is from 'Keratinase' and 'keratin break-down' that we chose our name, The BreaKERs.

We chose to do this project as our small community is struggling to deal with hair build-up in wastewater treatment facilities. These build-ups have caused equipment failure, clogs, and increase maintenance costs for our community. We researched and found that the only current solution to these blockages is to manually remove the accumulated hair, meaning that there is no truly efficient way to remove the hair from the water systems? Through our research we also found that keratin waste is a huge issue in the poultry processing industry, as feathers are also made up of the protein keratin. Billions of tones of feather wastes build-up, with limited options for disposal. Currently, feathers are being disposed of in environmentally harmful ways such as incineration, which leads to the release of many pollutants, foul odors, and harmful runoff contaminating livestock and plants in the surrounding area. Burying the waste is another common disposal method, which leads to harmful leachates. As keratin is protein, there is an option of turning keratin waste into products such as animal feed or fertilizer; however this process is extremely extensive and time consuming, often producing products of low quality.

Our project this year would provide an inexpensive and efficient method to more completely break down the keratin proteins in both hair and feathers, solving the issue of keratin waste treatment.