Team:IISER-Pune-India/TeamNotebook/Team Notebook 11e9906b405543a29361e38a50c81024/Meeting with Dr Annamma (IC 6ec8d71771c9440888f599a78382446a

Meeting with Dr. Annamma (IC

Meeting with Dr. Annamma (IC

Date
DepartmentHP
DescriptionIHP meeting on butanol production, bioreactor etc.
HP sub-branchiHP
Links/media
Participants
Property
Property 1
Property 2
TypeMeetings

Meeting Notes

^ are her questions/comments

  • ^ why butanol?
  • ^ how much sucrose and what time period will it produce per CO2
  • there are people in ICT working on cyanobacteria and butanol (separately she meant, i think?)
  • you will release 2 or 3 molecules of co2 when you produce a molecule of glucose
  • one glucose will 0.3 around
  • icgeb strain - very important to see what gram/gram yield theyre getting on glucose
  • what is the loss of co2 at that point
  • ^ why not look at mechanism wherein the sucrose is broken down by the cyanobacteria itself after production
  • - likku suggested for maintaining the tonicity for the salt stress
  • ^ how much co2, rate of uptake
  • ^ why a freshwater species
    • why not inducing constitutively?
      • salt is in the media - causing damage to e coli growth?
      • - not much, and we anyway need to slow e coli growth
  • sucrose production is induced by salt stress
  • ^ pH?
    • - we were told 7-8 pH is okay
    • bubbling co2 will create more alkalinity
    • she's a little concerned about the same
    • shams yazdani told us the alkilinity shouldnt be an issue
    • mg1655 might be slightly resistant to changes in pH
    • - we dont have a photobioreactor, so the cyanobacteria ppls advised us to directly put in sodium bicarbonate
    • Dr Raina pandit
      • usually have round bottom flasks which have a very narrow protrusion to which they attach a fish bubbler, they ensure there's circulation in the medium, and then they put in gases
    • ^ dual combinations
      • ^ any literature?
      • - phb, yeast,
    • ^ they'd thought of:
      • every alcohol fermentation gives out co2
      • yields are always 0.5 and lesser
      • they thought they could use the co2 produced and shuttle it back into the process
      • make it a carbon negative procedure from a carbon positive
      • work with the e coli system
      • reuse of the co2 back to get sucrose
    • carbon modelling
      • figure out the co2 exchange, should give us some overall limits over the project

    • butanol
      • toxicity for the culture is huge
      • when using claustridium, there's a certain limit
      • they tried making high cell density cultures to find max
      • rate of fixation of sucrose will decide the cost of your process
      • there's issues of maintainence in the aerobic condition
      • if we have the numbers handy it would help us with

      • raw materials, input-output parameters roughly can help us calculate the raw material cost, aerobic fermentation cost
      • for example glucose to ethanol
      • check shams' yield as it'll impact
      • don't focus just on making the project sustainable because economically that is useless and not realistic (ease of execution and economic viability is given max importance)
      • Pitch butanol as a solvent(economically speaking) and NOT as a fuel
      • Figure out media conditions and growth rate
      • Put experiments where you are testing butanol conc.
      • MIC(minimum inhibitory conc.) How much butanol can they tolerate?

    • Butanol Extraction
      • Pervaporation (butanol sucked out so the cells keep producing more butanol)
      • No exporter needed, it'll be in the medium (extracellular)

Pre-Meeting

HOD of DBT-ICB

Dr Annamma Anil, Associate Prof

Ask if we can record the call

Tell her in the beginning if she knows anyone we can reach out to, to any aspect that we mention during the call

Ask for contacts at each step

  • butanol market
    • purity
    • who are our end users
    • what else to keep in mind for end-users?
  • butanol extraction
  • bioreactor design
    • how to make sure we have enough co2
    • what type of photobioreactor to use
    • cell shading
    • continous vs batch
    • open air vs closed
    • risk of contamination
    • risk of loss of containment/escape of bacteria
    • dry lab, parameters to look out for
    • possible crash of the co-culture

  • scaling up (not primary concern, but) if we choose to do so
    • anything we can do now while building our project that would make it easier to scale up our project later
    • optimal media engineering?
  • Ask her if we can reach out to other people
  • Send a mail with these questions/aspects of the project
    • She could reply with people she knows
  • Ask for biosecurity and biosafety contacts from DBT.