Augusto & Jessica's Research Proposal Information

We want to engineer a microorganism or virus that will improve either:

• sewage water treatment/waste degradation (probably this)
• biofuel synthesis

Sewage Water Treatment

Scientific Background

• Bacteria are commonly used indicators of the effectiveness of wastewater treatment
  • May not accurately indicate the effectiveness of removing viruses and protozoa
• Bacteriophages have been proposed to be potential indicators of viruses
• sulphite-reducing bacteria have been proposed to be potential indicators of viruses

Social Context

• under-treated sewage is the main source of pathogens in water
• Estimated that 80% of infectious diseases (world-wide) may be water-related
  • Diarrheal diseases linked to water kill 2 million children and cause 900 million episodes of illness each year

Random Thoughts

• If we design a bacteria, perhaps utilize a protein degradation switch that will allow the bacteria to be destroyed at will

References

Gaussier H, Yang Q et al. Building a virus from scratch: assembly of an infectious virus using purified components in a rigorously defined biochemical assay system. Journal of Molecular Biology 2004; 357:1154-66

Kim DY and Rhe YH. Biodegradation of microbial and synthetic polyesters by fungi. Applications of Microbiology Biotechnology 61:300-308

Lucena F, Duran AE, et al. Reduction of bacterial indicators and bacteriophages infecting faecal bacteria in primary and secondary wastewater treatments. Journal of Applied Microbiology 2004; 97:1069-1076

Grilly C, Stricker J, Pang WL, Bennett MR, Hasty J. A synthetic gene network for tuning protein degradation in Saccharomyces cerevisiae . Molecular Systems Biology 2007; 3:127