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Team:Braunschweig
From 2014.igem.org
E. Cowli - Fighting climate change at the source
Dairy and beef production are important to our daily lives and consumption needs. However, there are serious climate change issues regarding the continual expansion of these industries. The natural microbiota inside the cow’s rumen releases dangerous amounts of greenhouse gases as they help digest the animal's food. Therefore, finding ways to decrease the production of greenhouse gases of dairy cows and cattle is essential in fighting global warming.
In this year’s iGEM project we fight global warming right at its source - the cow's rumen.
Using the powerful tools of synthetic biology we were able to reduce the methane levels through a genetically engineered bacteria named E. cowli, using the soluble form of the enzyme complex methane monooxygenase (sMMO) for hydroxylation of methane to methanol. We successfully expressed all the subunits in a soluble form and, furthermore, were able to prove the activity of the whole enzyme complex. Moreover, the effectivity, feasibility as well as the safety of this project was evaluated using a mathematical model.
Besides the laboratory-related topics we also initialized many more activities to spread the idea of synthetic biology and iGEM. On three occasions we had the chance to present ourselves and our project to the broad public, we taught synthetic biology not only in a lecture but also 1-on-1 in a hands-on internship with a pupil and we also used these events for evaluation of the peoples oppinion on synthetic biology and consumption of animal products. In many discussions with other teams we, furthermore, took the chance to discuss iGEM-related topics such as ethics, safety and intellectual property.
Get started and find out more about ourselves, our project and much more!
We are this years iGEM Team of the Technische Universität Braunschweig. Get to know us, our motivations and much more on our team profiles!
iGEM is more than only working in a lab - it's spreading the word. Find out more about our events and actions on our Policy and Practices page.
To evaluate the feasibilty of our project before has become reality we generated generated a mathematical model based on laboratry and literature data.
Project
The iGEM Team Braunschweig presents a novel approach towards the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions: We are going to equip the model organsim Escherichia coli with the methane monooxygenase (MMO), an enzyme complex enabling methaotrophs to use the greenhouse gas methane as sole source of carbon and energy, hence creating our methane degrading E. cowli.
While designing our project, safety was of course a very important issue for this year’s iGEM project. Issues in biosafety as well as gas health and safety were adressed.
Everyone who is interested in how we spent our iGEM summer, feel free to have a look at our Notebook, where we’ve put together a documenation of our lab work.
By contributing BioBricks to the iGEM Registry of Standard Biological Party so that other teams can use them in the future, we live up to the basic ideas of the iGEM competition.
