This morning, Ethan and I met with Dr. Aziz and Leah again. We shared our work from the previous day and began discussing some more ideas about how to make this fungi model more realistic. We had a very interesting discussion about different mathematical equations that could be used to model various variables’ effects on the reaction rate (e.g. temperature, pH, UV light, and dissolved oxygen) and ways to model water flow (in the real system, water would be flowing through the fungi filter).
After our meeting, to get a better context for our research, I spent some time reading a journal article that Leah shared detailing the different mechanisms that the fungi’s enzymes use to break down pollutants.
I spent the bulk of my day fine-tuning the enzyme kinetics aspect of the model (shoutout to Mr. Rushin–iykyk). I was working on writing code to incorporate the relationships between temperature, pH, UV light, and dissolved oxygen into the model. For each of the variables, there’s a sweet spot, where the rate is the fastest and enzymes function best. Then, on either side of the sweet spot, the rate decreases.
Look at all my bell curves! Each of these is for one of the variables. You can see the sweet spot is at the peak of the curve and the curve tapers off on both sides.
Below, you can see how the different conditions affect the rate of the reaction. On the left is when all of the variables are set to the optimal conditions. On the right is when the conditions are too acidic, so the enzymes don’t do their job 🙁
-Emily