PEtS

Last week, Andrew Song and I expended a sizable amount of our beauty sleep time to design five web pages and write a competition paper all for Exploravision. I named it PEtS or Photosynthetic Ethanol Synthetes, and it was on how to make ethanol fuels viable by internal cellulosic degradation in the plant itself (which I had previously alluded to in my paper on Ethanol fuels (The Biofuel Fantasy).

The Idea in Development:

My idea was based on computer programmer logic :). I was thinking about how to make plants pretty much degrade themselves for the betterment of mankind, and I got into thinking about 'if' loops after I saw this graph that linked the proteins of Arabidopsis thaliana so cleanly with outer stimuli (it shows the signal cascade with light as stimulus).

Further Research & Finish up:

After my epiphany, I set to work to find a protein which could easily link to cellulose degradation at the end of the plant's life (because for obvious reasons the plant cannot degrade its cellulosic support while trying to develop into a plant). After one of the longest lapses in brain function I've ever experienced, I realized I could link the cellulose degradation to the Flowering Locus T Protein (which is transcribed and translated near the end of the plant's life when it will flower). Afterwards, it was a relatively simple idea: get the promoter code of the Flowering Locus T Protein using the corresponding sticky ends, insert before the cellulase degrading gene egl (from the bacterium inside a cow's rumen--this transgenetic modification of plants with egl has been done before in tobacco plants already as described by Kawazu, Sun, Shibatu, et al. in their article "Expression of a bacterial endoglucanase gene in tobacco increases digestibility of its cell wall fibers" for Journal of Bioscience and Bioengineering), then insert the modified gene into a "tamed" Agrobacterium tumefaciens with a specific antibiotic-resistant gene either to penicillin or kanmycin (Agrobacterium tumefaciens is commonly used to insert new genes in Arabidopsis thaliana), infect Arabidopsis thaliana protoplasts, and finally, select the modified protoplasts with the antibiotic the modified protoplasts have resistance to. When the Flowering Locus T Protein is transcribed, the egl gene is also transcribed (it has the Flowering Locus T Protein promoter right before it as well), so as the plant flowers, it degrades its own cellulosic material. This will theoretically obviate the cellulose degrading step in ethanol production, moving ethanol fuels one step further toward sustainability.

That was pretty much the bulk of the project. In the submission itself, I covered the technology thus far, the history of ethanol fuels, and what is necessary in order for PEtS to succeed, but otherwise, I summarized my idea quite thoroughly above.

NOTE: 2/26/2010 Andrew and I received an Honorable Mention for this project. I think it was impressive considering I spent a little less than 24 hours on the project (less than some of my school projects!). The title links to the Honorable Mentions list.