This project aims to remove the belief that bacteria are the cause of the bad smell in our enviroment. When our FreshEcoli works as a synthetic perfume, people will change their idea. Because of the fact that this project needs to produce a good smell by getting rid of a bad odor, we needed a bad and good odor. For our bad odor, we decided to use the amine group substance TMA(Trimethylamine). The reason behind this decision was trimethylamine’s ability to quickly build up and also cause a disease called Trimethylaminuria(also called fish-odor syndrome) which results in a situation where a person smells like rotten fish, and also the fact that trimethylamine is easy to synthase. In the human body, the enzyme FMO3, which is a member of the FMO(flavin containing monooxygenase) family, oxidises TMA to get rid of it’s odor properties. In our project, we aim to produce TMA with a bacteria and FMO3 with another thus getting rid of the unpleasent fish odor. The second part of the project is on producing good smell. While performing this part, the aroma that we chose was geraniol. This compund is the source of the rose aroma and has an easy synthesis, and has an anti-cancer property. While designing the structure, we plot a system in which there are two bacteria, one of them produces TMA which results as the release of a bad odor; the second one produces geraniol and FMO3. This way, bad odor is replaced with good odor thus performing what we expect our FreshEcoli to do.

The working principle of our first bacterium is;

The promoter of our first bacteria was LuxpL as the TMA production must stop at some point; then the TMA enzyme set ,MMT-DMT-TMT, was connected to LuxpL ; for system 2 induction, LuxR and HSL was added to the end of the strain.

The working principle of our second bacterium is;

We placed the promoter LuxpR at the start of the system for the promoter to become active with the LuxR and HSL of the first system. For the conversion of TMA to TMAO, we added the FMO3 part to the promoter along with the geraniol production set, the GPPS-GS enzyme pair. To finish off the system, LuxR and HSL were added to our second system to inhibate the first system and to induce the second system . We can conclude that; Our duo-bacterial system first produces bad odor, afterwards breaks down the accumulated bad odor and finally produces geraniol also inhibating the bad odor system. By also inducing itself, FreshEcoli can work as synthetic perfume.

Results

1)Basic Parts: BBa_K727001, BBa_K727002, BBa_K727003, BBa_K727004, BBa_K727005, BBa_K727006

2)Composite Parts: BBa_K727007, BBa_K727008, BBa_K727009, BBa_K727011, BBa_K727727, BBa_K727777

These parts are confirmed.

We managed to clone and produce our parts and we proved it with electrophoresis.

Human Practices

Kindergarden Visit

We visited the Burc Child Academy. The children were taught several topics including what iGEM is, what bacteria really are, how synthetic biology works and more. This was proof that iGEM is for 7 to 77. Read more...

Flash Game

A little bacterium against thousand more.Will the never ending enemies of the FreshEcoli perish or will the last FreshEcoli fall? Click to play...

Team Video

A team video made with our lab team members. This video was made to show that working in a lab is not just ‘boring’ as some people actually think. Click to watch...

Canvas Times

A magazine prepared by us! It contains everything about our project, our human practices and more. Read more...

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