Product Overview

N2O-Eaters offer a long-lasting, sustainable alternative for nitrous oxide mitigation by leveraging its only known natural sink: the nos gene cluster. The nos cluster encodes for nitrous oxide reductase, an enzyme responsible for reducing nitrous oxide back into harmless nitrogen gas, thus completing the nitrogen cycle. Critically, this gene is missing in over 80% of soil bacteria. Therefore, N2O-Eaters seek to address this bottleneck by introducing genes into the native soil microbiome and augmenting it at the genetic level to remove nitrous oxide at its source.

By utilizing engineered integrative and conjugative elements of B. subtilis (XPORT developed by Voigt lab @ MIT), we can deliver the nos cluster to a broad range of bacterial species. With proper biocontainment measures in place, genetic propagation becomes controllable and efficient, allowing mixed bacterial cultures to synthesize their own enzymes and reduce nitrous oxide.

Propagation and expression of genes can be verified quickly using fluorescent markers in our design. Since bacterial genes are expressed in groups known as operons, with expression strength decreasing as the gene is farther from the start of the operon, the inclusion of the fluorescent proteins.