How and why we chose our Igem project
The climate crisis is one of humanity’s biggest problems and will be a prevalent one for generations to come. While climate change is a culmination of several factors, a neglected but important one is Methane.
While methane is less prevalent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, it is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide at heating the atmosphere, meaning that small removals of methane can have a big impact. In addition to being a major contributor to climate change, oxidation of methane is responsible for the majority of the ozone formation in the troposphere, and ground level ozone exposure contributed to 365,000 deaths in 2019.
“Human-caused methane emissions could be reduced by as much as 45 per cent within the decade. This would avert nearly 0.3°C of global warming by 2045, helping to limit global temperature rise to 1.5˚C and putting the planet on track to achieve the Paris Agreement targets. Every year, the subsequent reduction in ground-level ozone would also prevent 260,000 premature deaths, 775,000 asthma-related hospital visits, 73 billion hours of lost labour from extreme heat and 25 million tonnes of crop losses.”
Landfills release 3.7 million metric tons of methane over 20 years and are the third largest source of human-related methane emissions in the United States (11% of all methane emissions).
Currently, people try to remove methane by placing perforated tubes in landfills that suck the gas out. This has an 85 percent efficiency or more in closed engineered landfills, however in open landfills the efficiency is 10 percent or less. We saw the need for another method to remove methane from open landfills, a chance for us, high schoolers, to help out.
We aim to genetically edit a strain of Bacillus, a bacterium naturally occurring in soil. We will insert an enzyme, modified soluble methane monooxygenase, into it that will cause the bacteria to respire methane and convert it into an amino acid, serine.
To test whether this will work, we will place the edited bacterium in an airtight container with methane and see how much the methane reduces over time using a methane sensor (which Nikira Labs graciously allowed us to use). A group from Oxford has recently inserted a similar gene into plants, and the gene has prior been inserted into e-coli, so we believe inserting the enzyme into Bacillus will be possible.