Team:BioscienceDragons AZ

From 2013hs.igem.org

Project Description: Our team is looking to create a bio-panel. A bio-panel is solar panel type device where us bacteria to harness solar energy to produce ethanol. What we want to focus on for the time of competition is developing and testing the bacteria that will be used to produce ethanol. The bacteria we will use is E. coli and we will transform it with two separate plasmids. One plasmid to produce a protein that is a light driven proton pump to allow the bacteria to produce ATP from sunlight. The second plasmid will allow the bacteria to ferment glucose into ethanol. This would essentially allow the bacteria to get energy from the sun and thus use the glucose to produce ethanol, virtually creating a bacteria that in a sense produces ethanol from sunlight. Eventually the plan is to get this into a solar panel type device for the efficient production of ethanol as a biofuel, but for time being we will focus on engineering the light driven ethanol producing bacteria.