Team:NFLS/Overview
Overview
Drawing inspiration from daily life and an Agriculture Base, we initially decided to focus on devising an environmentally friendly way to process waste paper and straws after reading the literature. We then conducted a questionnaire to gather public cognition on the present treatments of waste paper and straws, the concept of microorganisms and Microbial Fuel Cell (MFC) and the acceptance of using genetically engineer to process garbage. Finally, we firmed our determination to use synthetic biology to process waste paper and straws.
To optimize our project, we interviewed and visited all sorts of experts regarding every aspects of our program, including academic and experimental interviews, business visit and hardware interviews. To be specific, we first interviewed Professor Yong Xiaoyu, who mainly focused on MFC, in Nanjing Tech University. We were inspired to introduce the process of wastewater to the MFC, whose anode tap could process multivalent ions in the wastewater. He also recommended to us the P.aeruginoa, which was more efficient in MFCs, but we decided to use E.coli due to the consideration of safety. Then, we visited Professor You Li, who focused on environmental protection, especially the treatments for wastewater, from Hohai University. He inspired us to clear which type of wastewater we should use and to preprocess the wastewater to provide the E.coli with an suitable environment. Furthermore, we visited professor Hou Siyuan from China Pharmaceutical University and he gave us some guidance on the design of experiment. After that, we visited a biotechnology company, Genscript, which inspired us to apply our project to industrial production and public use, thus we began design our hardware. We then visited a 3D printing club from the China Pharmaceutical University and improved our 3D model.
During the whole process, we also attended three meet-ups to communicate with other teams. Through meet-ups, we discovered two of our collaboration teams, JNFLS and QHFZ-China, and drew suggestions from other teams on our hardware.
To impart the concept and knowledge to the public, we also held two lectures in high school, one introducing synthetic biology and one introducing our own project.
