Team:GDSYZX/Description
Discription
Background
The background of our investigation is the status of heavy metal contamination in Guangzhou. According to available material, several rivers in Guangzhou, such as Chigang Chong and DongHao Chong, and the sediment of sand under the rivers was the most polluted element. The cadmium content per kilogram of sediment reached 34.98 mg in some sections of the river. This is far beyond the standard of the standard content in drinking water in China which is 0.005 mg per kilogram.
(a dirty water near our school)
（another polluted river in GUANGZHOU）
Besides, heavy metal pollution also aroused a number of disease including minamata disease, manganese poisoning, itai-itai disease. Those series of current situation should be paid more attention.
（itai-itai disease) (another terrible disease cause by heavy metal)
How to treat this problem in traditional ways
There are several ways to sort out this heavy metal problem, like engineering management, agriculture management, chemical treatment. First, the chemical precipitation method exists the same risk of destroying the ecological environment as the heavy metal pollution. Second, the traditional electrolysis method has the limitation of small amount of sewage, high energy consumption. Third, the absorption technology is not widely used because of the lack of complete post-treatment technology. In such an situation, cities need a more efficient, environmentally safe heavy metal management product. It is precisely such a project that we are working on.
Our work
Our goal of this year is to create a kind of yeast to control heavy metal contamination in water. Heavy metal pollution has the characteristics of being enriched by the biological chain.Traditional treatment methods such as chemical reagent sedimentation mostly bring about great environment pollution and potential safety hazard. We aim at treating this pollution with yeast in an environmentally friendly, economical and effective manner. We found that gene PCS1 extracted from Arabidopsis thaliana can synthesize phytochelatins to chelate heavy metal ion. we use the genetic engineering techniques to take the pcs1 gene from Arabidopsis thaliana and then transfer it into the pPIC9K plasmid. The final step of the process is to transfer this plasmid into the yeast’s cell and activate the gene expression of psc1.