Team:Acton-BoxboroughRHS

From 2014hs.igem.org

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Team

Our team of sixteen students is from the Acton-Boxborough Regional High School, includes Akash Kapoor, Chris Kuffner, Mayank Mali, Benjamin Pervier, Madhuri Jois, Wynne Yao, Charles Taussig, Tara Jawahar, Rachel Tao, Katherine Liu, Barry Huang, Ben Stern, Justin Hong, William Huang, Victoria Chen, and Anusha Purakayastha, and is coached by Aaron Mathieu.

The team's profile can be found here.

Project

Our team has finalized our large amalgamation of thoughts to a few possible projets:

1. Fat/sugar/protein converter
2. Genetically produced fuel/BioDeisel
3. Kopi Luwak Coffee
4. 1. 3-5 certain enzymes get rid of bitter proteins and carbohydrates, making coffee more sweet.
   2. Electronic nodes can be used to detect changes in certain composition of beans.
5. Bacteria that absorbs CO2/fossil fuel by product/catalytic converter
6. Skin regenerating Bacteria
7. Bacteria with memory/synthetic neurons
8. Synthetic/modified mitochondria or chloroplast

Final Project Description

Kopi Luwak coffee is the rarest and the most expensive type of coffee in the world. This notorious beverage is made from the feces of the Asian Palm Civet (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus) or Luwak, a cat-like omnivore that fills the niche of a racoon in Asia. The Asian Palm Civet eats raw coffee berries. As the berries are digested, enzymes in the animal’s digestive tract break down components of the coffee bean that are responsible for its bitter taste. However, the beans themselves are not digested. The civet only digests the fleshy outer layer, so when it defecates, it leaves clumps of coffee beans that have been processed by its enzymes. The beans are then cleaned, roasted, and brewed to make the Kopi Luwak coffee.

Due to the complexity of this process, Kopi Luwak is a very expensive item at $600 per pound. The outrageous price has made Kopi Luwak a novelty for the rich. Its allegedly excellent flavor is sadly something that most people are unable to afford. Another drawback of Kopi Luwak is that demand has driven businesses to animal cruelty in order to keep up production. A small civet farming industry has tens of thousands of civets living in battery cages being force fed coffee berries. Civets, being omnivores, are no more capable of surviving on coffee than humans. As a result their population is diminishing.

We propose to make this process more humane, efficient, and sanitary by using bacteria instead of civets to process coffee berries into Kopi Luwak beans. We will accomplish this by inserting genes that code for proteins found in the civet’s digestive tract into a hardy bacteria that can withstand the pH levels required for the proteins to operate. We intend to add genes for salivary amylase, pepsin, pancreatic amylase, trypsin, and chymotrypsin, sequenced from palm civets or closely-related species. Once the bacteria have been transformed, we will attempt to simulate the digestive process of the civet on coffee berries and analyze our results.

Although this project seems unconventional, putting animal enzymes in bacteria has been done before to great effect. Take rennet cheese for an example. In order to obtain the enzymes required to produce this cheese, a calf must be slaughtered; the material (rennet) is taken from the dead animal’s digestive tract. Now, due to growing demand for this cheese, bacteria containing the rennet enzymes are used instead. Today, the sale of these cheeses is a popular and profitable industry. By putting animal enzymes in bacteria, we create a digestive platform that is capable of processing more than just coffee berries.

Notebook

First Few Weeks

In the first few weeks, we had introduced iGEM to students, taken sneek-peeks on projects done by past iGEM teams, and done small exercises. One example of a demonstration was modelling the process of producing a plasmid of recombinant DNA with restriction enzymes and ligase using pipe cleaners, candies, labels and scissors.

Up to February 26 2014

Our team has done some moderate research on final topics. The final project will be picked soon. These are a list of the possible candidates:

1. Fat/sugar/protein converter
2. Genetically produced fuel/BioDeisel
3. Kopi Luwak Coffee
4. Bacteria that absorbs CO2/fossil fuel by product/catalytic converter
5. Skin regenerating Bacteria
6. Bacteria with memory/synthetic neurons
7. Synthetic/modified mitochondria or chloroplast

February 27 2014 Narrowing it down.

:Genetically produced fuel/BioDeisel :Kopi Luwak Coffee (''COLI'' Luwak Coffee) :Bacteria with memory/synthetic neurons / Battery?

March 6 2014

Final Decision by the Team:

• Kopi Luwak Coffee
• (project name is E. COLI Luwak)

March 12 2014

Our team has officially designated team members to certain tasks for the project. These Include:

1. The team wiki
2. Research on Kopi Luwak project
3. Working on the 3A assembly kit for genetic recombination

On a side note, after this meeting, the growth for the 3A assembly kit has had some trouble (now fixed) twice.

Results/Conclusions

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Safety

What safety precautions did your team take? Did you take a safety training course? Were you supervised at all times in the lab?

Attributions

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Human Practices

What impact does/will your project have on the public?

Fun!

What was your favorite team snack?? Have a picture of your team mascot?