Team:FAFU-CHINA/Implementation

Implementation

DESCRIPTION

Preface

In real life, spices are widely used. We want to apply our project to the real world without compromising biosafety. Compared with the use of spices, aroma produced by microorganisms has the advantages of long duration, strong plasticity and low cost.

Our projects mainly include the design of spice producing strains and the design of light-controlled co-culture system. Our project can not only develop to industrial production of spices, but also directly used in the daily life of commodities.

Microbial production of flavor

In general, essential oils are obtained from plant materials by distillation or supercritical CO2 extraction. However, the content of essential oil in plants is not high, for example, the maximum content of essential oil in rose is also very limited (0.043%), and the content and quality of essential oil will also decline in the process of storage and transportation. Existing literature indicates that when the strain is optimized, the production efficiency of essential oil is much higher than that of plant^[1]. Therefore, we believe that using microorganisms to produce essential oils is a more economical and efficient method.

In the future, we hope to introduce the improved MVA pathway into algae. Using algae organisms can carry out photosynthesis characteristics, in order to further reduce the cost of biological culture process. Our target users are flavor manufacturers, and we will provide them with optimized strains. They were able to use our strains in large culture tanks for flavor production, just like wine production. Under continuous high density culture, the strain is easy to degenerate. We will use PTVA (Postransformational Vector Amplification) method^[2] in the laboratory to screen strains with appropriate gene copy number and supply them to manufacturers to ensure good fermentation effect. Screen strains with appropriate gene copy number and supply them to manufacturers to ensure good fermentation effect.

Scented microbial night light

For the ancient nobility, incense is an indispensable part of life. A fragrant lamp, with a bit of warm fire and continuously sweet atmosphere, announcing that people's life is still continuing in the quiet night. Now aromatherapy has entered the public life, we hope to bring people who love aromatherapy with a different new experience.
Our products are mainly for families. It has two options for users to choose from.

A: Remove the culture tank from the lamp

The fermenter receives light signals from the environment, allowing the fragrance to change with the circadian rhythm.

B: Place the culture tank in the lamp

The lampshade of the night light is made up of blue light filters, which prevent blue light from coming into the fermenter as a signal. The night light is equipped with a lighting system. When the night light is on, the white light can be used as a signal input to the system, and the lamp shade can absorb the blue light in the white light, making the night light emit yellow light. Yellow light belongs to warm color illuminant, lamplight is more downy, which can give a person sweet and comfortable feeling, suiting sleeping atmosphere. At the same time, the lamp shade made of blue light filter can also avoid the blue and purple light components in the light source to inhibit the secretion of melatonin in the human body. We also added built-in fans to the top of the night light to help the aromas in the fermenter spread outward.

Our small night light will be featured in the hardware section of the WiKi. Our product also includes a fermenter with two LIDS at the mouth and a filter membrane (0.22μm) on the outer cover attached to a tip tube containing bacteria. There is a gap between the outer cover and the inner cover, and the pipette is suspended slightly above the inner cover. The inner cap is an aluminum foil sealing film for sealing the culture medium in the fermenter. Remove the protective device, press the outer cover, make the outer cover and the inner cover completely solid, the sealing film in the fermenter is punctured by the sharp tooth at the bottom of the outer cap, the dry powder bag of the strain in the interlayer falls into the water, gently shake the fermenter can start microbial fermentation.

This design makes the product transportation and use are very convenient. Because of the lid made of a filter membrane, the microorganisms in the fermenter cannot leak out of the fermenter into the environment and external microorganisms cannot enter the fermenter, thus avoiding the need for antibiotics and strains with resistance genes. In addition, the use of a filter cover does not prevent the spread of fragrance from inside the fermenter.

Safety

The organisms used in our project are safe, but the potential risk is that the strains we use contain plasmids that carry resistance genes. This is because we are still in the experimental verification stage at present. When the system is mature, we will use the compound nutrient deficiency strain instead of using the anti-plasmid. In this case, the strain will not be able to grow and proliferate after leaving the medium and will soon die.

We encourage users to recycle the used fermenter, replace the filter cover of the fermenter with the seal cover provided by us and send it to us. We will high-temperature sterilize the whole fermenter to kill all microorganisms in it. In order to prevent users from directly dumping the fermentation liquid, we will include dew disinfectant in the product and instruct them to properly handle the fermentation liquid to avoid microbial leakage.

There are different opinions on aromatics such as linalool in academic circles. In the realm of life, we will strictly control the ability of the strain to produce fragrance, so that it is far below the level that can adversely affect the human body.

Before entering the market, our project still needs to go through extensive testing; In particular, after toxicology tests, to judge whether the fragrance produced will cause adverse effects on the environment and biology.

Reference

[1] Sunga A, Tolstorukov I, Cregg J, et al.Postransformational vector amplification in the yeast Pichia pastoris[J].FEMS Yeast Res，2008，8:870-876

[2] Dos Santos ÉRQ, Maia JGS, Fontes-Júnior EA, do Socorro Ferraz Maia C. Linalool as a Therapeutic and Medicinal Tool in Depression Treatment: A Review. Curr Neuropharmacol. 2021 Sep 19.