Pico Plumber : A Project Overview

Introduction

Every day millions of litres of water are lost from leaky pipes all throughout Britain. [1]
The London Assembly alone reported a loss of nearly 1000 million litres of water for the region in 2003/2004. [2]
Similar problems are experienced by the Oil and Sewage industries where leaky pipes not only translate into a loss of revenue, but also put strain on the environment.
With this in mind we decided to explore ways in which synthetic biology can be used to address this and comparable problems. We concluded that the most useful solution would be one that can detect microscopic leaks by itself and seal them.
In order to achieve this we identified a number of characteristics we wanted our Bacteria to display.

1. Motility - In order for our bacteria to move towards the leak.
2. An AND gate which would turn on production of tropoelastin and lysyl oxidase (our “Glue”)
3. A latching mechanism that would continue production of tropoelastin once the and gate was triggered
4. A timed lyses’ mechanism that would allow for protein production, after the AND gate trigger, but eventually lyses the cell and release the ”glue”.

Since developing a fully functional version of this that can be used in industry would be a task far beyond the scope of an undergraduate summer project, our aim was to develop an prove of concept for the various elements of the system, under favourable conditions and upon success to develop them further.

References

[1] http://www.thameswater.co.uk/cps/rde/xchg/corp/hs.xsl/6869.htm
[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4330721.stm

Supervisors

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