Team:Lambert GA
THE PROJECT
Chitosan, you might never have heard of it, but we guarantee you've benefitted from it. Chitosan has far ranging uses from agriculture, medicinal, biofilm production to industrial water treatment. Chitosan first came to our attention as an anti fungal agent through last year's project to prevent crop spoilage. Through our research we realized that the current methods of producing chitosan involve strong acids and bases and leave the environment damaged.Lambert iGEM tackled this issue last year by dreaming up Chitinite, an inexpensive and bio-friendly alternative to current caustic and chemically intensive methods of chitosan production. This year we are continuing our project by further characterizing our CDA by biobricking and expressing it in E.coli. Chitosan is toxic to e.coli, but by using a PelB tag to express CDA in the periplasm, we greatly reduce toxicity. This method facilitates cheap mass production of CDA. By making an eco-friendly fungicide accessible and cheap, Lambert iGEM hopes to protect the environment and help save the world.
Our project also highlights the Foldscope, a paper microscope developed by the Stanford Prakash Lab. As a high school team, we struggled firsthand with the lack of resources and lab equipment that plagues many other high school iGEM teams. The foldscope is a cheap and effective microscope with a wide range of uses. By investigating applications of the Foldscope in a bioengineering context, we hope to allow more high school teams without funds for expensive lab equipment to pursue their passions in synthetic biology.
