Team:Qdai/Description
Description & Inspiration
Description
Our project this year is Alternative to Canary.
The idea of carbon monoxide detectors goes back to the first days of coal mining when canaries were often taken down into the mines as an early warning system for harmful gasses such as CO and methane. During the 20th century, coal miners brought canaries into coal mines as an early warning signal for toxic gases, primarily carbon monoxide. The canaries, like other birds, are good early detectors of carbon monoxide because they are vulnerable to airborne poison. In this way, the birds would become sick before the miners, who would then have a chance to escape or put on protective respirators. Qdai will assure that this will not happen again by raising awareness on sentinel species.
A famous example of the use of canaries in Japan is the “hard-line investigation of the Aum Shinrikyo facility in Kamikuishiki Village. The bird was very effective in guaranteeing human safety in a facility where there was concern about sarin production.
Eventually, scientists developed more sophisticated detectors, electronic devices. These made it possible to guarantee safety without using the canary animal. And let’s not forget the robots. They can be remotely controlled, making it easy for them to search places that would otherwise be inaccessible to us.
However, it is not a secret that the depletion of resources means a global concern. In particular, metals used in semiconductors, such as platinum, are dwindling since they are alloys that are difficult to recycle. Moreover, handling electronic devices means that the places where they can act are limited, for instance, in water areas. Therefore, it is essential to design devices with waterproof processing.
In this way, we propose an alternative to the canary using E. coli bacteria. By doing this, the detector does not use metal, nor does it require electricity.
Problem
The use of canaries constitutes ethical problems because of the use of animals as instruments. Even though electronic devices were developed to detect poisonous gases, most of these detectors depend on metals to work. This fact creates another disadvantage since the world is facing the problem of depleting resources. In particular, carbon monoxide detection devices use platinum, which is anticipated to rise in price in the future due to its depletion. Therefore, we need to find a new device made of organic materials to avoid the overuse of platinum.
Solution
This year, team Qdai intended to use genetically engineered E. coli (Escherichia coli) bacterium to replace platinum. These engineered bacterium were thought to emit a visiable signal, which is a slight glow in our project, in quantitative response to CO. To achieve this, Qdai decides to combine a gene that can react to poisonous gases as well as canaries and a gene that can visually tell us about it. Moreover, Qdai aims to incorporate biological containment into the device, taking into consideration environmental emissions. The team plans to use the Escherichia coli K-12 strain to develop the detector. Since this strain has been modified to survive in culture only under specific conditions, being unable to survive at all in the human gut, the safety in its handling is assured.
However, it is not easy to build a system that can detect multiple gases simultaneously, like the current combined gas sensor or the former canary. First, our primary focus is carbon monoxide, which is produced by incomplete combustion. Most accnts in coal mines are carbon monoxide poisoning, and most of the toxic gases that Canary had detected were this gas. Our experiment is based on the idea of creating a device like a litmus test paper that could react to this gas and, eventually, could be applied to future technology.
We start this project to make the bacteria glow upon CO exposure, and many of our plans change in terms of practicality when it comes to the business model. For more details, please refer to Human Practice and Proposed Implementation sections.
Team Qdai hopes to take the first steps in the path of creating a safe, reliable, and sustainable alternative to the use of platinum-based CO detectors throughout this year. The long-term goal is to manufacture the device and distribute it globally.
References
[1]Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry Agency for Natural Resources and Energy
Platinum usage statistics
https://www.enecho.meti.go.jp/statistics/coal_and_minerals/cm005/results.html
[2]MITSUBISHIMATERIALSGOLDPARK
https://gold.mmc.co.jp/market/platinum-price/#platinum_5year
[3]AONO, Shigetoshi “Regulation of gene expression by CO sensor protein CooA”
2005 (0), S12-S12, 2005