WELCOME TO iGEM 2014!

Your team has been approved and you are ready to start the iGEM season!
On this page you can document your project, introduce your team members, document your progress
and share your iGEM experience with the rest of the world!

Click here to edit this page!

Project Description

Content

Microbial enhanced oil recovery (MEOR) is a popular method which relies on microorganisms and their metabolic products to mobilize residual oil. For example, some bacteria are able to produce emulsifier, and others can produce biosurfactant. These two bio-products can work together to help form a stable water-oil mixture with good mobility, which makes it easier to remove oil. However, the bacteria producing emulsifier can feed on oil but those biosurfactant-producing kinds cannot. As a result, no matter by injecting nutrients or adding other kinds of surfactant along with water, surfactant cannot be blend with oil efficiently.

Our project is to solve this problem by constructing a bacterial strain that can utilize oil as its carbon resource as well as producing emulsifier and biosurfactant at the same time.

We start with a Pseudomonas stutter strain, a kind of bacterium that can produce a special kind of emulsifier and live well in the oil reservoirs all by itself. To make it more powerful, we plan to express the rhamnosyltransferase operon genes rhlABRI from Pseudomonas aeruginosa in it, so that it can produce rhamnolipid, a biosurfactant that can mobilize residual oil in the reservoir by reducing the oil-water interfacial tension (IFT).

References

iGEM teams are encouraged to record references you use during the course of your research. They should be posted somewhere on your wiki so that judges and other visitors can see how you though about your project and what works inspired you.

You can use these subtopics to further explain your project

1. Overall project summary
2. Project Details
3. Materials and Methods
4. The Experiments
5. Results
6. Data analysis
7. Conclusions

It's important for teams to describe all the creativity that goes into an iGEM project, along with all the great ideas your team will come up with over the course of your work.

It's also important to clearly describe your achievements so that judges will know what you tried to do and where you succeeded. Please write your project page such that what you achieved is easy to distinguish from what you attempted.