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- All Subjects: Sustainability
- All Subjects: engineering
The environment today is facing concerns over accumulation of plastics in landfills as well as excessive CO2 emissions. Containers and packaging take up approximately 15 million tons each year, and accumulations such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch are entering the oceans. Work has been done to alter and treat polyethylene plastic to be added to cement mixtures. This is done to increase bearing capacity and ductility of concrete in addition to decreasing carbon emissions and plastic waste.
Protein and gene circuit level synthetic bioengineering can require years to develop a single target. Phage assisted continuous evolution (PACE) is a powerful new tool for rapidly engineering new genes and proteins, but the method requires an automated cell culture system, making it inaccessible to non industrial research programs. Complex protein functions, like specific binding, require similarly dynamic PACE selection that can be alternatively induced or suppressed, with heat labile chemicals like tetracycline. Selection conditions must be controlled continuously over days, with adjustments made every few minutes. To make PACE experiments accessible to the broader community, we designed dedicated cell culture hardware and integrated optogenetically controlled plasmids. The low cost and open source platform allows a user to conduct PACE with continuous monitoring and precise control of evolution using light.