Team:SCAU-China
From 2014.igem.org
WELCOME TO iGEM 2014!Your team has been approved and you are ready to start the iGEM season!
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Requirements | ||||||||||||
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Project description | ||||||||||||
For traditional energy resources are depleting rapidly in modern sociecty, new clean energy resources are highly desired to sustain the human development. In addition, fresh water shortage is a critical globle issue, which increases the demand of desalination of seawater despite its high-costed and energy-consuming processes. Microbial Fuel Cell (MFC) is a novel electricity generator, producing electric current via metabolization of waste organic substrates by electrogenic microorganisms. However, low output of power density limits the application of MFC. So in this project, we combined MFC with a seawater desalination device as a Microbial Desalination Cell (MDC), and tried to increase the power density by genetic modification of the microbes in three ways. Firstly, we knocked out the ''arcA'' gene of E.coli, which encodes a negative regulatory transcriptional factor of enzymes in TCA Circle and reduces the metabolic rate under anaerobic condition, leading to increase the electricity output. Secondly, we over-expressed nadE gene to boot up the NAD+(H) level in the cells facilitating the electron transferring rate. Finaly, we incorporated porin OprF, a membrane channels for electron exchange, into the nadE-overexpressed microbes. Moreover, we optimized the desalination effeciency by improving the size of chamber, the shape of water path and the electrode composition in a traditional MDC device. In short, our project aims to enhence the electrogenic capacity with our genetically modified bacteria, so the sewage treatment and desalination plant can work together to achieve a prospective sustainable eco-device. |