Our project on STEM is about bacillus, a bacteria with keratin properties which can be used to preserve feathers and turn them into a form of protein that could be recycled and will do good to the ecosystem. There are a myriad of branches in microbiology that can be investigated to help sprout ideas that can help turn the environment into a more beautiful and safer world. Science such as microbiology has proven itself a necessity in life and much of use in ordinary day lives. For example medicine, environmental, agriculturally, industrial and in technology. To go along with this, biotechnology is one field which has the potential to change the course of life itself. Employed properly, it can bring about vast improvement in human life and its environment. But used improperly, as in atomic energy used for making bombs, it can bring about untold misery to human life. On this page, we will post our SS connection showing how science in microbiology has changed and how its effected the world throughout the years and how our perspective in science and how it has traveled through our economic lives.
Our project is about turning something presumably useless, in this case feathers, and transform it into a type of usable protein. This experiment will help preserve large amounts of feathers that are being wasted and creates harm to the air we breathe. With the new found source of protein we've created, we will be able to give it as a supplement to animals and improve their health as well as other uses such as floral assistance and probiotics that can help with digestion. On this page we will post our SS connection showing how our project using microbiology is observed differently in the world and how it can be work in places with more pollution such as Houston TX.
In today's world there are many people that don't think twice in littering which is awful since we are given only one Earth to live on which is why we should embrace it. Living in Houston TX we have seen many areas such as Galveston that are widely polluted and sometimes we even step out our homes and look up just to see a cloudy and grey sky with a wacky weather. This is due to the ozone layer being damaged by the burning of feathers which produces harmful toxins that spreads through the air that can cause harmful diseases to humans. Doing research we have learned that chicken is the most consumed meat making it the largest poultry industry world wide however many of us don't know the story behind a chicken farm. Chicken farms are tremendously polluted with feathers which is why we have come up with a solution to helping geographical places such as Houston to clean the air we breathe.
One of the most useful techniques we utilized was sequencing, which has been around for many years but has increasingly improved. In the past, sequencing, or the distinguishing of DNA, was done manually. The first large scale sequencing project was the Human Genome Project. They spent several years and millions of dollars trying to map out the human DNA sequence but now it can be done in just a few weeks and with a significantly smaller charge. An example of a sequencing technique that is used today is the 16s rRNA Gene and BLAST. The 16s rRNA which is what was used to find our own bacillus strains is a common genetic marker that can be used for identification. Once the sequence is revealed BLAST or Basic Local Alignment Search Tool is used which is a very helpful database that holds the sequences of almost every organism. And just by plugging in the sequence you can see a list of all organisms with that specific genetic pattern.