Kombucha!!!
When you drink a glass of kombucha, you're drinking more than just fermented tea. Can you guess what's so special about this type of tea?
Kombucha is made from tea and sugar, but it also needs the aid of a very special helper...
Komagataeibacter rhaeticus AF1!!!!
This type of bacteria not only makes great tea, but it's also capable of producing bacterial cellulose and this material is a great alternative to vegetal cellulose.
It also has various other applications, ranging from being used as an excellent type of bandage for treating burn victims, to serving as a very good scaffold to develop many types of cell cultures!
Inspired by this, our team took on the test of domesticating K. rhaeticus and developing a pipeline for spanning cultivation of bacteria using agroindustrial waste to creating new biomedical applications for Bacterial Cellulose.
We worked on the optimization of culture conditions, metabolic modeling as a guide for genetic manipulations, development of protocols, design and construction of a toolbox with plasmid backbones suitable for this organism.
Based on that, we embarked on the task of engineering, designing of a low-cost induction system, constructing a low-cost dual-stage bioreactor, developing molds for custom BC sheet production, successful tests of adhesion of human cell lines to BC membranes and, last but not least, we put our efforts on the dissemination of synthetic biology to the wider community!
