Interviews with experts in both industry and academia deepened our insights and guided the development of our project, including wet lab, dry lab, entrepreneurship, and implementation.
Interview with Dr Jon Pittman led us to choose auxin as the microalgal growth mechanism in our wet lab.
The symposium we and other iGEM teams organised led us to consider bioethics and government regulation in more depth.
The follow-up meeting we had with Prof George Patrinos after the symposium made us more aware of government regulation and risk assessment, which was then incorporated into our implementation plan.
Interview with Prof Philip Shapira led us to develop a comprehensive business plan of our project and to reach out to the aviation industry.
Meeting with Q8 aviation led to our business plan embodying the aviation sector.
Visiting microalgae cultivation plants and bioreactors in Almeria helped us understand the real-life viability of our project, which was then incorporated into our business plan. We also received great help in modelling.
Interview with Prof John Love led us to consider developing a competition assay model.
In the initial planning and research stage of our wet lab, we were looking for an efficient method to accelerate microalgae growth. We spoke to Dr Jon Pittman to gain a deeper understanding of the microalgae growth process and where we can jump in to increase the growth rate.
Dr Jon Pittman is a senior lecturer at the University of Manchester. Research in his lab is focused around understanding how algae utilises metals, both essential metal nutrients and toxic metals. He is also interested in understanding how algae can efficiently produce lipids that can be transformed to biofuel. We reached out to Dr Pittman for his insight into our project design in the early stages. In particular, we were interested in his opinion on increasing iron uptake for microalgal growth in the first part of our project.
From this interview, we learned that…
Iron is a plentiful source for the microalgae and is not a limiting factor for microalgal growth.
Dr Pittman suggested , however, that we look into plant hormones, such as auxins, for potential growth factors as these tend to be more limiting for microalgae.
After this interview, we went through a thorough research on microalgal growth hormones and settled on indole-3-acetic acid (IAA) as our choice. Then, we looked for genes encoding IAA in E.coli, which was subsequently incorporated into our wet lab successfully. Our talk with Dr Pittman helped us understand the microalgae growth process better and contributed substantially in our wet lab.
Utilisation of wastewater in microalgal cultivation can be a very specific process, and we wanted to grasp this concept in more depth through our conversation with Professor John Love, rather than solely depending on literature research.
Professor John Love is a Professor of Synthetic Biology at the University of Exeter. His research focuses on the production of ‘fourth generation’ biofuels and the use of microalgae to aid in waste nutrient recycling in the water purification industry. We reached out to Prof Love in order to understand his opinion on our project and to learn more about the biofuel industry as well as the water purification industry.
From this interview, we learned that…
The competition between bacterial species in wastewater can be a critical challenge for our bacteria to thrive.
This had led us to consider developing a competition assay through computational modelling to better understand the survival rate of our bacteria in harmony with other organisms in wastewater. Although the competition modelling has not been realized due to time constraints, this is something we will definitely work on when expanding from our project after iGEM.
We were passionate about putting together a comprehensive business plan for our project. We spoke to Professor Philip Shapira in hopes of improving the entrepreneurship and business aspects and to gain a non-scientific perspective towards our project.
Professor Philip Shapira is a Professor of Innovation Management and Policy within the Manchester Institute for Innovation Research. He particularly focuses on responsible research and innovation in the Manchester Synthetic Biology Research Centre. Prof. Shapira spoke to us about the business opportunities with our project and the stakeholders we should be targeting. Our initial belief was that the end user that would benefit from our engineered bacteria are automobile (such as cars) users as our product would reduce the production costs of biofuel, therefore making biofuel a more available source of fuel for everyday people.
From this interview, we learned that…
automobile industry is moving more towards electric cars as they receive subsidies from the government for doing this, hence have a strong motive to move towards electric cars opposed to other sources of renewable energy such as biofuels.
The aviation industry is highly interested in biofuels opposed to electricity as batteries would not be a suitable support system for aeroplanes.
This changed our outlook on our potential stakeholders and we focused more on our stakeholders from the aviation industry. Following our meeting with Prof. Shapira, we researched different sectors of aviation to gain more insights into the industry. In fact, we were very fortunate to secure an interview with Q8 aviation, an aviation fuel supplier company, as outlined below. Overall, our meeting with Prof Shapira had led us to develop a more in-depth business plan and to explore a new prospective sector for our project to expand to.
The aviation industry contributes substantially to global CO2 emissions, with a growing proportion each year. Search for cost-effective and environmental bio-jet fuels is gaining momentum, and microalgae-based biofuel can be an attractive candidate for a petroleum fuel replacement. During our talk with Professor Shapira from AMBS, we realised that the aviation industry's dependence on oil-based fuel is quite inescapable, especially compared to other transportation sectors whose fuels could be easily replaced with electric power.
Therefore, we reached out to Q8 aviation, a major aviation fuel supplier based in the UK, to gain more insights into the use of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) within the industry and to learn how the industry views the potential of this alternative fuel source. We were lucky to be able to have a talk with Mr. Olan Ryan, who is the sustainable aviation fuel manager at Q8 aviation.
From this interview, we learned that…
Approximately 0.1% of the current jet fuel comes from sustainable sources, and petroleum still constitutes a significant portion of the jet fuel in use;
One of the major barriers that prevents biofuel from being more widely deployed is the cost;
Biofuel is on average three to five times more expensive than petroleum fuel, notably due to the limited feedstock to produce biofuel from.
Another valuable resource that Mr. Ryan shared in our meeting was the Waypoint 2050 plan. Waypoint 2050, published in 2020, outlines how the global aviation industry will strive to reach its net-zero CO2 emission goal by 2050.
The biggest hurdle for sustainable aviation fuel is the high cost of production.
However, SAF is also the most promising way to meet the net-zero carbon emission goal within the aviation industry.
Talking to Mr. Ryan from Q8 aviation has informed us that the biggest bottleneck of implementing biofuel is the production cost. We believe that BloomAid bacteria could increase efficiency of microalgal biofuel production, which could result in production cost reduction. Upon this realisation, we proceeded to make a cost analysis on implementing BloomAid bacteria into biofuel production to comprehend how much of cost reduction BloomAid can bring about. Overall, our meeting with Q8 aviation was very informative and led us to incorporate the aviation sector when developing entrepreneurship section of our project.
After the bioethics symposium, we realised that implementation of our system can not only be a scientific challenge, but also a multi-step process involving governmental regulations and safety measures. By talking to Professor George Patrinos, we hoped to appreciate these procedures better.
Professor George Patrinos is an Associate Professor of Pharmacogenomics and Pharmaceutical Biotechnology in the University of Patras in Greece. His research focuses around the clinical implementation of pharmacogenetics and genomics of rare diseases. Professor Patrinos participated as a panel member in the symposium we have organised with other teams regarding bioethics and governmental regulations towards synthetic biology. After the symposium, we have reached out to Professor Patrinos in order to understand the implementation process into the real world of our project, the impact of our project on the environment and what ethical dilemmas our project may face.
From this interview, we learned that…
An anonymised survey, approved by our University’s Ethics Committee, is a good future step our team could take to understand people’s opinion towards our project.
Overcoming the biocontainment breach risks associated with our project is an important issue to consider.
We have to make sure that our engineered E.coli won’t outcompete the wild type strains within the targeted water body if our system gets released into the environment in an uncontrolled manner.
We have previously established a mathematical-based nutrient leakage model that would help us predict the concentration of contaminants spilled from our bioreactor in the river Thames, tackling some of the issues Professor Patrinos mentioned. Furthermore, the suggestion from Professor Patrinos harmonised with the suggestion of Professor John Love and made us consider for the future to develop a competition assay to understand better the survival rate of our bacteria in consonance with the other organisms present in the wastewater media. Therefore, before pursuing the implementation of our project in the real world, we would conduct this sort of mathematical modelling that would help us also understand if our engineered E.coli will outcompete the wild type strains present in the wastewater medium. These proposed ideas from Prof Patrinos have been incorporated into the implementation section of our project.
Operating microalgae cultivation facilities as well as biofuels bioreactors in real life is very different from the books and literature. We were hoping to comprehend better the hands-on experiences and practical challenges with these processes by speaking to Dr Gabriel Acien.
Dr. Francisco Gabriel Acien Fernandez became a Doctor in Chemistry from the University of Almería in 1996, becoming an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Almería until 2012, and University Professor at the University of Almería since then. Dr. Gabriel Acien provided us with important information about the cultivation conditions of microalgae in wastewater. In this regard he provided us with important mathematical models and nutrient concentrations from which we built our model. He provided an analysis on the challenges that the biofuel market is facing in terms of economic sustainability, providing us with estimations of the costs of producing and purifying microalgal fatty acids. He added to this by showing us the bioreactors in the University of Almeria, allowing us to observe different photobioreactors and open raceway ponds employing organic wastewater.
From this interview we learned that...
The most efficient method of microalgal cultivation involves the use of photobioreactors to maximise the size of the microalgal community, followed by open raceway ponds for the induction of lipid accumulation.
The coupling of wastewater treatment with microalgal lipid production is fundamental if the economic balance for biofuel production seeks to be positive.
The governmental regulations regarding the placement of the bioreactors and consumer health and safety regulations are the biggest bottlenecks in the market at the moment. This is because microalgal cultivation is classified as an aquaculture activity, which requires the companies to purchase land to establish the bioreactors and cultivation facilities.
The biggest bottlenecks in biodiesel costs are in the extraction process and the transformation process. The cultivation strategy needs to focus on reducing the costs of these practices.
The University of Almeria provided us with mathematical models to simulate phosphate and nitrogen uptake in Scenedesmus microalgae.
During this semi-presential week-long course, we learned the basis of current stress induction methods for the production of valuable compounds, the operational costs of photobioreactors, and the industrial scale-up of the microalgae cultivation process. The course was delivered by a set of experts in the microalgal and bioreactor sector from across Spain, Portugal, and South America. During the course, we had the chance to speak with experts in the field of bioreactors and microalgal biology.
From this interview we learned that:
The use of microalgae-bacteria consortiums is a viable strategy for large-scale wastewater treatment applications Their project involving these two organisms is currently on trial for application in the entire Buenos Aires metropolitan region, in collaboration with AYSA.
Apart from the competition with other microorganisms existing in the wastewater medium and dangerous pre-existing molecules, another fitness cost of consortium bacteria (especially those that have been genetically modified) is the rapid oxidation reactions caused by high oxygen concentrations and UV radiation in the open raceway ponds.
The practical knowledge regarding the operational costs of photobioreactors and the microalgal cultivation facilities as well as the scale-up strategy of the whole process has been a valuable resources for the entrepreneurship section of our project.
New Scientist Live hosted an event at the Manchester Central Convention Complex with different booths hosting demonstrations, such as DNA extraction from strawberries and composing music using DNA sequences. The aim of this event was to boost awareness and engagement around the sciences, particularly life science. Members of our team joined this event as volunteers to aid in these demonstrations and promote awareness and engagement around synthetic biology.
We attended the monthly seminar hosted at the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology. We were particularly interested in a talk given by Alex Munro-Clark, a doctoral student who was presenting her work “Investigating the Ecology and Chemistry of Prymnesium parvum: A toxic blooming algae”.
