The team got together thanks to everyone's interest in applied Synthetic Biology but our bond and work only sustained themselves because of our deeper interest in helping the planet. Everyone sympathized with the idea of using Biology to make the world a more environmentally friendly place. So even when we completely changed the focus of the project(from styropolis to cellulopolis), this dream stayed true. The dream of using whatever we have in hand to help nature, even by using nature itself as a tool with which we could change the future and so therefore it is no understatement that our team lived and breathed sustainability as we ran the project, it was an idea we always had in mind.
It is no secret that a lot of iGEM teams first get together thanks to their PIs engagement with Synthetic Biology, but as the team members discussed the project with each other it became clear that we needed to find our own principle to a simple question. “why?”. Why use synthetic Biology in the first place? Why would it be interesting to make a change in any sector? Why are we getting together to learn this?
The answer to this question struck us when we realized that we could use Synthetic Biology to make technologies that not only were more effective than the ones we have today but that were also sustainable and environmentally responsible. Thus, our team engaged in a quest to find our goal, an environmental issue that could be solved using synthetic Biology and bring a new product to the market that could be made by recycling the material that was driving the issue. We planned to find the perfect rags we could use to turn into riches, using synbio as our tool.
One of the first steps of the team was to conduct big research on waste management, visiting labs and recycling centers to learn more about the process of making new things out of, for the lack of a better word, trash. It was during one of those visits that we learned about the importance of recycling plastics and thus we decided to try working with styrofoam.
Our first idea of an iGEM project was to describe and test a design that could produce an enzyme capable of degrading the first big molecule that is polystyrene(the main component of styrofoam). The biggest issues with this idea were how the material could be handled, as styrofoam usually occupies a lot of space and we needed a big lot of it to run the experiments. We soon found out that the project with polystyrene had two major issues: 1) That there wasn't enough on the metagenomics of organisms known to consume polystyrene to select and work with a gene that could express our enzyme. 2) That the conditions of the styrofoam, as it occupies a lot of space when not empty of air, were far too difficult to work with.
We then decided to try new ways to make the material more compact and easier to work with, even running some tests using D-limonene as a solvent, having good results on this matter. Even though compacting the material wasn’t easy, we were still already happy with the results of the limonene tests, as it shows that there is a sustainable way to dissolve styrofoam compared to other solvents. But we still had no concrete results to support the polystyrene degrading line of research.
While running the tests with styrofoam and enzyme hunting our hope in the project slowly began to fade as we found out that the idea was unfeasible. Unfortunately, there were far too many barriers to overcome in order to complete this idea, but we still had the work with D-limonene as a sustainable solvent in hand and most importantly we still had the idea to work with sustainable technologies in mind. So in the middle of our tests, we decided to change our unfeasible styrofoam approach and went back to the drawing board to see what else we could do to make the world a better place.
Searching for new ways to use synthetic Biology and our previously gathered knowledge about the environmental situation in Brazil was no easy task, but we stumbled across the data about Brazilian agricultural waste generation. We realized that there was a way we could still work with waste management by developing a new application for residues in the synbio Industry.
That’s when it hit us that we could use such residues to make our means of culture for the CHASSI bacteria, Komagataeibacter rhaeticus, therefore recycling it and making it useful for bacterial cellulose production, and with that, the Cellulopolis project was born.
The project was born with the idea of producing a widely useful and applicable material such as cellulose using a reliable resource that would otherwise be thrown away, which wasn’t hard to find. The idea of making a new product out of waste material was the main focus of the cellulopolis project, and it would not be complete if the final product wasn’t interesting for industrial purposes, so cellulose was the best choice.
Bacterial cellulose, our choice of the final product, is a very versatile material. It is also more pertinent for the environment seeing as it doesn’t utilize large amounts of wood and therefore requires less space to be produced. It also doesn’t need to be purified like wood cellulose so it cuts down costs of purification and biochemical waste production.
With that in mind, sustainability permeates the very foundations of the cellulopolis project and remains one of the most important goals for the team.