Heavy sour crude oil is becoming harder and more expensive to process, while fuel standards continue to demand lower sulfur content. Today, refineries rely on hydrodesulfurization, a high-heat, high-pressure process that consumes hydrogen gas and requires heavy industrial infrastructure. iGEM uOttawa is exploring whether engineered biology can offer a cleaner, lower-resource alternative. Our project uses biodesulfurization to investigate how bacteria could help remove sulfur from crude oil under milder conditions, with the long-term goal of developing a biological unit operation that supports cleaner fuel processing during the transition toward more sustainable energy systems.

Our project focuses on building and comparing two biological approaches to sulfur removal. First, we are developing an optimized single-strain system as a benchmark for biological desulfurization. Second, we are exploring a microbial consortium, where multiple specialized bacteria work together instead of placing the full burden on one organism. This allows us to investigate whether cooperation between microbes can improve performance, reduce cellular stress, and support functions that may be difficult for a single strain to complete alone. By comparing these systems, iGEM uOttawa aims to generate an early proof of concept for cooperative microbial bioprocessing and better understand how synthetic biology could be applied to industrial sustainability challenges.
This keeps the summary focused on the external problem and big solution, while the description focuses on what your team is actually building/testing. It also avoids sensitive details like enzyme substitutions, promoter design, operon structure, and exact construct strategy.