Team:HZAU-China/Hardware

<!doctype html>

Loading

Hardware

Overview

We designed three auxiliary products to make it more convenient for our product to apply: sodium alginate particles with engineered bacteria embedded, a “box” which could detect geosmin and dispose of feces, and a multifunctional APP to control “the box”.

Design

Sodium alginate pellets

While applying, the engineered bacteria at dormant state would be fixed with food-grade sodium alginate in the shape of tiny beads(Figure 1.), which could prevent bacteria from escaping in some extent. Together with the Suicide Module, the safety of our product is well guaranteed. Consumers could mix a certain amount of beads with pets’ food, then the probiotics fixed on sodium alginate would get activated when beads go through the digestive tract, and to perform detecting function. Cell immobilizing was applied following the listed steps.
  1. melt sodium alginate to liquid state.
  2. Cool it to room temperature, then mix the dry powder of engineered bacteria with it and stir the mixture evenly.
  3. Use a 2-mL syringe to drip the mixture into CaCl2 solution at a slow and constant speed to form tiny gel beads.
  4. Keep beads soaked in CaCl2 solution for 30 min to stabilize the structure(Figure 1).
Figure 1. Sodium alginate gel beads with engineered bacteria embedded.


Box

A box was designed as the container of feces to fulfil various functions (Figure 2,3). First, the box is equipped with a sensor and a screen. When the feces of IBD sufferer is loaded in, the sensor would detect the existence of geosmin and present the concentration on screen. In addition, the box is made of special material to reduce the emission of off-odor.
Figure 2.Dynamic presentation of Box.


Figure 3.The design of the box and the physical picture.


According to literature, geosmin would degrade effectively when UV light and disinfectant are applied together. We designed a band of UV light on top of the box and a container filled with disinfectant. As soon as the existence of geosmin is identified by sensor and presented, the disinfection device would start to disinfect and deodorize. In addition, an inner blue-tooth device is capable of connecting with the APP we developed, producing more potential functions and convenient usage of the box.

APP

We developed an versatile APP to connect with the sensor and analyze the data：the APP could process the data and give feedback to owners, operate the on or off of desinfection equipment, send kinds of pets’ health information daily... More functions would be developed in the future to make our device more intelligent and convenient.
For more details, please click the link below: https://2021.igem.org/Team:HZAU-China/Software

Note

Due to the less experimental time the Sodium alginate gel beads are just conceptual products.