Team:AHUT China

Shining Sanctifier Description:

     Water, the origin of life, is the necessary and elementary component of our daily life. As the progress of modern industry and life, especially in petrochemical engineering and agriculture, large amount of sewage which contains inorganic nitrogen has been produced. It is the chief culprit which leads to the red tide.
     Various kinds of means have been developed to dispose nitrite and ammonium which are the main contaminants of this type of effluent. One of them is anaerobic ammonium oxidation bacteria (anammox) which can convert the fomite in the water into nitrogen.

      However, the enrichment of the bacterial strain takes much time and it is very sensible to oxygen. This nature leads to the numerous obstacles in the industrial application.
     Our goal is to design a wastewater treatment system which can absorb the pollutant efficiently while transform it into luminous energy. We plan to use E.coli to design a bacterium that can digest the nitrite and ammonium in its interior using the disposal system from the anammox. Through the introduction of luciferase, the energy can be transformed into bioluminescence. Therefore, we named it Shining Sanctifier. This new star in synthetic biology will overcome the traditional issues and be applied to the sewage treatment system on a large scale while it can also be made into illuminating system in the future.

NH4+ + NO2- → N2 + 2H2O,   ΔG° = -357 kJ/mol