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Bike Tire Inflation and Puncture Repair

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Imagine what would happen if you were riding your bike in the middle of nowhere and all of the sudden your tire goes flat and now your stranded. What would happen? Well with what the CSU iGEM 2013 team is developing all you have to do is feed the tube of your tire some of our special slime. Then you can continue on with your bike ride. A little later the window in your special CSU iGEM tire will begin to glow green! That simply means that you will need to feed your bike. So what does this all mean? Our concept is that before you get a flat tire you have our slime inside your tire and it will continuously release air into your tire. Our specialized pressure release valve will maintain the correct pressure for your tire and keep it from blowing up! Then our slime will seal any hole you get in your tire as well!

Here's the Idea

Results

So before we even attempted to engineer new yeast, we needed an initial trial to see if the tires would even inflate with hydrogen peroxide and yeast. We used a 26" bicycle tire as our testing apparatus. To measure pressure we used a Fluke Multimeter to directly measure millivolts from a pressure transducer hooked up to the bicycle tire. We combined the yeast (20ml), 10% H2O2 (100ml), YPD (130ml) in the tire itself sequentially. Once mixed, we immediately attached the pressure transducer and began recording data once every 10 seconds. Below is the graph of our results.