Team:BUCT-China/Description

Background
Abstract
What is PHFA
3D printing
References

Description

Ⅰ.Background

The National Space Administration (NASA) plans to achieve a manned mission to Mars in the mid-2030s, and Elon Musk's space X project plans to achieve Mars settlement in 2050. Human settlement on Mars is almost a reality. The average temperature of -63 degrees Celsius, 38% of the earth's gravity, extremely high radiation intensity, oxygen-deficient atmosphere, meteorite impact and other harsh objective conditions have brought huge challenges to the habitability design of the red planet Mars. But this does not prevent scientists from developing rich thinking based on existing technologies. Many scientific teams in the world have gradually explored feasible solutions to the transportation, accommodation, food and other aspects of Martian migration. In terms of food, it is generally divided into food produced by plant cultivation and food produced by animal husbandry. GWW Wamelink, JY Frissel, WHJ Krijnen and MR Verwoert and others[1] explored the cultivation of ten different crops, cress, and others by simulating the soil conditions of Mars. The possibility of arugula, tomato, radish, rye, quinoa, spinach, chives, peas and leeks, with the exception of spinach, nine out of ten species grow well proved the feasibility of plant cultivation in solving the food problem of Martian immigrants. When it comes to traditional animal husbandry, that requires a large area, and the animals themselves have strict environmental requirements. Traditional animal husbandry can hardly meet the food requirements of Martian immigrants. Currently, cultured meat, as an emerging meat food production technology with a small footprint and strong controllability, seems to be another possible choice for Martian immigrant food. Based on this idea, we have launched the production of scaffold materials using synthetic biological technology. And through 3D printing and tissue engineering technology to produce the idea of cultured meat.

Ⅱ.Abstract

Our team is committed to using synthetic biology methods and tissue engineering to explore the feasibility of creating cultured meat, which may provide another choice for food supply in immigration to Mars. Based on last year's study, we made some improvements and conducted further exploration work.

Our project is mainly divided into two sections, first section is the creation of bio-compatible material for scaffold, material that combined by polymer material of PHFA (poly hydroxyl fatty acid) and collagen. The second section is mixing animal cells with scaffold which is printed by 3D printer and culturing and differentiating cells to create cultured meat. The first section can be achieved through four steps:

1. We take advantage of the fatty acid synthesis pathway of E.coli to synthesize myristoleic acid from glucose, we construct an artificial metabolic pathway that can desaturate the ACP-fatty acid and finish the fatty acid synthesis to produce 14C fatty acid[2] [3] [4].
2. We use another E.coli as chassis bacterial to hydroxylate myristoleic acid from step1 as hydroxy myristoleic acid, the genes of fatty acid transferase and hydroxylase are transferred into bacteria[5] [6] [7].
3. Based on synthetic biology, we constructed another engineered bacterium to utilize hydroxy myristoleic acid to synthesize product the new material PHFA(poly hydroxyl fatty acid) through polymerization of hydroxy fatty acid.
4. We also using plasmids as vector to synthesize functional collagen in prokaryotic E.coli, collagen as an ingredient of scaffold can not only improve the texture of cultured meat, but also simulating the surrounding environment of growing cells.
By combination of PHFA and collagen as a raw material of 3D printing scaffold.

In the second section, we select chicken muscle satellite cells as seed cells mixed with scaffolds for co-printing. we create various 3D model on software with diverse percentage of materials to print ideal scaffold. To better understand the cell growing process and give a support for future studies, we establish a mathematics model to simulate the growing of cultured meat

Ⅲ.What is PHFA

The full name of PHFA is poly hydroxyl fatty acid, this is a new material, because its structure is very similar to PHA, we think it may have similar characteristics with PHA and it's also environmentally friendly. At the same time, our material PHFA has longer carbon chain, we speculate that it may be better than PHA in some mechanical properties.

Ⅳ.3D printing scaffold

The manufacture of biological scaffolds is one of the important contents of the research in the field of tissue engineering. The ideal biological scaffold must have good biocompatibility, meet the cell growth conditions without repulsive reaction with the cells, and have certain mechanical properties and be able to degradation. At the same time, the application of 3D printing technology in the field of tissue engineering provides a new idea for the manufacture of tissue engineering scaffolds, which has the advantages of speed and accuracy.

Ⅴ.References

[1]Wamelink, G.W.W., Frissel, J.Y., Krijnen, W.H.J. and Verwoert, M.R.. "Crop growth and viability of seeds on Mars and Moon soil simulants" Open Agriculture, vol. 4, no. 1, 2019, pp. 509-516. https://doi.org/10.1515/opag-2019-0051
[2]吴洪号,张慧,贾佳,崔琦,郑丽波.功能性多不饱和脂肪酸的生理功能及应用研究进展[J].中国食品添加剂,2021,32(08):134-140.
[3]Pereira S L. Recent advances in the study of fatty acid desaturases from animals and lower eukaryotes[J]. Prostaglandins Leukot Essent Fatty Acids, 2003, 68(2): 97-106.
[4]Los D A, Ray M K. Differences in the control of the temperature-dependent expression of four genes for desaturases in Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803[J]. Mol Microbio, 1997, 25(6): 1167-1175.
[5]Nishizawa O I, Fujii T, Azuma M, et al. Low temperature resistance of higher plant s is significantly enhanced by a nonspecific cyanobacterial desaturase [J]. Nature Biotechnology, 1996, 14: 1003-1006.
[6] Black, P. N. (1988). The fadL gene product of Escherichia coli is an outer membrane protein required for uptake of long-chain fatty acids and involved in sensitivity to bacteriophage T2. Journal of bacteriology, 170(6), 2850-2854. https://doi.org/10.1128/jb.170.6.2850-2854.1988
[7] Wang, X., Li, L., Zheng, Y., Zou, H., Cao, Y., Liu, H., … Xian, M. (2012). Biosynthesis of long chain hydroxyfatty acids from glucose by engineered Escherichia coli. Bioresource Technology, 114, 561–566. doi:10.1016/j.biortech.2012.02.119
[8] Brühlmann, F., Fourage, L., Ullmann, C., Haefliger, O. P., Jeckelmann, N., Dubois, C., & Wahler, D. (2014). Engineering cytochrome P450 BM3 of Bacillus megaterium for terminal oxidation of palmitic acid. Journal of Biotechnology, 184, 17–26. doi:10.1016/j.jbiotec.2014.05.002