Team:BIT-China/Safety
In the procedure of modern industrial fermentation, the tiny fluctuation of pH will tremendously influence the physiological function of bacteria. For example, it will affect the growth activity of cells and subsequently decrease the yield of desired production. People usually solve this problem by adding alkali or acid straightly into the bacteria solution and keep an immobilized pH in a narrow range. Our project will show you a completely new idea about how to create a suitable environment and keep the intracellular pH homeostasis for the engineered bacteria by themselves.
The main application field of our project will be the industrial fermentation. The products from industrial fermentation are widely used in our daily life. A large proportion of food and medicine come from this field. So, the safety of our project is of vital importance and it’s our duty to explain any questions concerning safety.
If you ask us whether our project is safe or not, we will say yes and it won’t do any harm to humans and the environment. The main reason is that we don’t use anything dangerous in our whole project, from the sequences of our genes to the chassis we used. For the acid and alkali producing genes, we have built a simple library to avoid producing something harmful. In the future, we are willing to expand the range of the chassis, like the Pichia pastoris which is a recognized safe chassis.