Team:Berkeley/HumanPractice/Economics

From the data we gathered from ABPDU and our interview with an executive in the dyeing industry, we began to sketch out what our process may look like when scaled up.

Here, we put together a schematic of our envisioned scale up. Bacteria engineered to produce indican would be grown anaerobically, and the dyeing agent would be isolated from cell culture by lysing and centrifuging the mixture. Clothing could be dipped into indican and subsequently exposed to B-glucosidase, grown and purified in a second reactor.

There are several aspects of this method that remain open to question as we work to refine our laboratory scale dyeing process. Current experimentation with growing and secreting B-glucosidase in yeast could demonstrate that lysis and protein purification are unnecessary to our process. Indeed, we have already shown that impure B-glucosidase (i.e lysed E. coli cells that are producing the B-glucosidase) is capable of converting indican to indigo relatively quickly (data not shown). Experimenting with other similar glucosidases may also help us to choose the correct glucosidase given industrial conditions. Indican may also be secreted, as the glucose moiety on the molecule may allow us to engineer its transport out of the cell through a native glucose transporter

Even after our process is sufficiently optimized for scale up, several considerations must be taken into account to accurately assess economic feasibility.