Team:HBUT-China/Description
In recent years, nickel ion pollution has become an environmental issue of public concern. China has stipulated that the maximum allowable concentration of nickel in surface water is 0.5mg/liter. The treatment of nickel ion in sewage today has certain limitations, such as high cost, low efficiency, and high energy consumption.
Motivated by this, the HBUT-China team aimed to design recombinant strains for the detection of nickel ions using synthetic biology methods. First of all, we wanted to make an improvement on last year’s project. We replaced the fluorescent gene mRFP, whose protein requires excitation light to illuminate, with a bioluminescent gene luxCDABE. At the same time, the bioluminescent protein also solved a problem with interference from the natural fluorescence of the E.coli. Through modeling, we determined the most suitable linear range of nickel ion concentration.
In the HP section, we did a nine-day water quality survey and learned about the public’s perception of nickel-ion contamination. We believe that we should not only improve nickel ion detection, but also focus on nickel ion absorbance/removal.
By searching relevant sources, we found a Ni2+ channel protein gene, nikABCDE. After inserting this gene into Nickel Hunter, upstream of our gene line, we found that it not only can absorb significantly more nickel ion, it also improved the accuracy of detection as the system becomes more sensitive to the amount of nickel ion.
Next, we wanted to design a machine where we could put a sample into the its injection pool, then through the chip processing, a photoelectric conversion module, and a WiFi module, realize real-time monitoring of nickel ion levels on a mobile device.
We were also concerned about the leakage of E. coli containing nickel ions into nature. We wanted to replace the chassis cells in yeast with two channel proteins, TjZNT1 and TgMTP1t2, on the cell membrane and tonoplast, which can transport nickel ions step by step, then nickel ions in the environment would accumulate in the vacuoles of these yeast cells, thereby reducing the concentration in the nickel ion environment. We wanted to then seek a means to filter out this Nickel ion-loaded yeast, thus removing or reducing nickel ion concentrations in the environment.
Description
