Team:York
Hello, We are the iGEM team representing the University of York!
University of York is located in North Yorkshire, England.
This year we have chosen to come up with a solution to a problem at the root of eutrophication- where too much phosphate in water bodies leads to algal blooms. These blooms disrupt local ecosystems by causing ‘dead zones’ in which animals are lost from the habitat. The input of wastewater into these bodies is a large contributing factor to the issue. Phosphate removal from wastewater is a considerable challenge that we hope to solve with biological agents as an alternative to chemical treatment. Our project builds upon the ideas of enhanced biological phosphate removal (EBPR) in which bacteria known as polyphosphate accumulating organisms (PAOs) in activated sludge acquire phosphate inside their cells. However these current microbiological tools are inefficient and we feel that designing a bacterium to remove phosphate will be much better suited to the task.
Our team is working on exploiting the natural abilities of Escherichia coli. By studying its phosphate metabolism we aim to improve E.coli ‘s phosphate uptake from the environment and therefore engineer a bacterium that can be used as a better alternative to the current methods used by wastewater facilities. For this our team is looking into the genes responsible for phosphate transport and polyphosphate kinases (PPK) to allow the luxury uptake of phosphate into the E.Coli cells. We plan also to borrow genes from different organisms to enhance the natural bioremediation processes that already exist in our model. By the end of the summer we hope to have created a bacterium both efficient and stable for high levels of phosphate uptake.
We envisage our project to be a part of many future applications relating to the uptake and recovery of phosphate, with the possibility of being integrated with other projects also.
