Thankfully this year our team managed to send our research division as interns to Scripps Research Institute and work together closely with the Badran lab for two months. Lab members helped familiarize the research division with lab equipment and procedures and paid for all of the new parts our team used: sequencing of the various plasmids, any new primers, and more.
After selecting our project, our team examined research from numerous published papers and from Scripps that was relevant to detecting TPA using plasmids. Our team found that many past attempts at detecting TPA or at degrading PET fell noticeably short. A main concern of previous biosensors was their relatively low dynamic range at roughly 6 to 7 fold at best. Our team tackled the challenge of trying to optimize this dynamic range by exploring and testing both old and new parts such as various TPA importers, different reporter genes, and a promoter that better responds to tpaR, a transcription factor, to try and develop a more responsive TPA biosensor.
The end users for our project are mainly other biologists researching PET degradation and also environmental scientists as a whole. PET degradation is still a fresh topic, and extensive research is currently being done in order to find a more efficient pathway for breaking down PET rather than slowly having it decompose on its own or with the help of an inefficient enzymatic catalyst. We hope that our research assessing the degradation of PET can help discover information previously unknown about PET and its monomer components, which can be used in future research focused on finding ways to break down this plastic. Furthermore, our project of developing a biosensor for TPA can have a wide impact. If successful in producing a large dynamic range, we may eventually be able to provide environmental scientists with a more accurate and consistent tool to detect PET degradation if given the resources to do so, possibly aiding the advancement of a solution to the plastic problem. However, given the time frame of our project, our current goal mainly consists of the former, which is contributing to more foundational and future research in degrading PET.