Using Nature to Solve Man-made Problems

The Facts

Huge environmental problem

Polyethylene—most common plastic

Biodegradable plastic CO2 emission

Traditional Methods of Degradation Sunlight, moisure, oxygen, and composting

Previous Studies

Convert polystyrene into a biodegradable plastic

Previous Studies

Sphingomonas bacteria and Pseudomonas eat polyethylene

Previous Studies

What We Could Do

Crazy Reengineering

Sphingomonas bacteria so they both degrade the plastic and take up the CO2 released during degradation

Interesting• Scaling up

• Increase the degradation rate

• • Address the CO2

emission problem

Safe Basic research

focusing on the biochemical pathway in Sphingomonas and Pseudomonas bacteria that help them eat plastic

Good IGEM Project?

Applicable

Borderlines Energy

Reasonable Size

Surprisingly Little has been done

Sources

http://www.reusablebags.com/ http://news.therecord.com/article/354044 http://www.ucd.ie/cscb/main_pages/news/news010306.htm http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=5844268&page=1 http://www.degradable.net/how/in_detail.shtml http://genome.jgi-psf.org/draft_microbes/novar/novar.home.htm http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16649270