Team 6: Mycoremediation - Sustainable Pollution Solution

Inspiration

Our team was formed because of our shared interest in how we can harness and enhance natural phenomena to produce environmental solutions. We were inspired by the impact that pollution has had on the world, particularly noting the way in which industrial activities have lead to contamination of the air, earth, and water. Of particular interest to our team was pollution caused by polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and heavy metals, which are a group of compounds that are noted to have toxic, mutagenic, and carcinogenic properties.

Significance

Pollution accounts for the loss of 5% gross domestic product (GDP) in developing countries and 16% of deaths globally. Apart from its effect on public health and the economy, pollution can also threaten food security, drinking water availability, and biodiversity. Locally, one of NC’s major environmental issues is the contamination of soil, air, and water. Due to the expansion of intensive hog, chicken, and turkey farms, NC has more tons of manure per acre of farmland than any other state, according to a report published in Feb. 2020.

Currently, there are various physical and chemical methods available for the removal and degradation of harmful chemicals from soil and water. However, these methods are often expensive, produce toxic byproducts, and ineffective for chemicals that are low in concentration yet high in toxicity.

What it does

Our solution utilizes the power of mycoremediation, which relies on the natural ability of fungi to sequester and breakdown many industrial contaminants. Mycoremediation is a cost-effective, eco-friendly, and effective method compared to existing bioremediation techniques. Current methods for the treatment of contaminants using fungi exist, and work has been done in the field of optimization. However, these methods are currently limited by fungal metabolism and growth. We believe that our proposed solution has the potential to further improve mycoremediation to be more effective, efficient, and rapid.

Our two proposed methods of optimization: 1) Directed evolution to select optimal strains of fungi for optimal pollutant intake. 2) Smart inoculation to optimize growth and spreading of fungi through a four-cycle process (altering incubation time and fruiting time)

We also propose using the fungal byproducts as sustainable building blocks, because research has been done on the recycling of fungal materials to produce new construction products. By selling these fungal materials, we can reinvest profits into improving our optimization methods and infrastructure.

How we built it

Conceptualization of the system relied on literature searches for existing techniques and possible enzyme targets for engineering. Implementation of this project will rely on the use of mutagenesis and directed evolution.

Challenges we ran into

The challenge was two-fold, choosing the right method to increase mushroom yield and choosing the right method for deployment. The former required extensive research into the science behind the rate limiting steps of mycoremediation, and the latter required scouring regulatory documents and news article son pollution treatment.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We believe mycoremediation is an effective and sustainable solution to treating industrial pollution. We propose a novel closed-loop cycle of utilizing mushroom and fungi for remediation, containing the pollution, and repurposing the produced mushroom to create secondary materials. The profit from the repurposed material can be utilized in the investment of more mushroom and infrastructure to restart the remediation cycle. In addition, we combined directed evolution and mutagenesis with mycoremediation in order to maximize remediation efficiency.

What we learned

Through this project, our team learned more about many of the techniques being used in the reduction of pollution, and the severity of the issue of global pollution. Additionally, we had the opportunity to familiarize ourselves with the ways in which mutagenesis and directed evolution is being applied for this end, opening our eyes to the potential of various forms of engineering to tackle the world’s biggest problems. We also learned about the complexities of this issue and the difficulty in tackling this issue on a large scale, but we were happily surprised to find that there are many promising solutions in the works.

What's next for us

In the future, our team hopes to carry out the experiments required for the verification of our optimization methods. We also hope to gather data for a proof concept, further refine our implementation plan, and possibly conduct studies to determine the impacts of our proposed solution.