Team:HSHL/Description
Description
Abstract
Enabeling Tobacco plants to hyperaccumulate heavy metals
Our challenge is to solve the problem of heavy metal polluted soil, especially in areas of high industrial use, such as mining. Extensive coal mining in the past released a high amount of heavy metals, such as lead or cadmium into the soil, thus making the soil unsuitable for agricultural use. Since plants like salad have the tendency of incorporating these heavy metals, consuming those plants is unhealthy for humans and other animals. Our goal is to enable a tabacco plant to hyperaccumulate cadmium and lead by transfering genes of Arabidopsis Halleri and adding other special abilities that support the accumulation of heavy metals. Our goal is to use Agrobacterium Tumefacies in order to enable our tobacco plant to hyperaccumulate the heavy metals. Heavy metals are often used in the IT and computer industry, for example to produce lead acid batteries. Since our tobacco plant contains a high quantity of valuable heavy metals, we plan to recycle those, thus protecting the environment and its rare and most importantly finite recources.
Our work
The plant we are using is Arabidopsis Halleri (A. halleri). It is distributed in and around central/eastern Europe where it occurs on soils contaminated with Zinc (Zn) and Cadmium (Cd) such as the German Ruhr area. In comparison to other species, root tolerance tests show that A. halleri tolerates higher Zn/Cd concentrations in hydroponic medium.
Our current work focuses on the isolation and cloning of these and other heavy metal hyper accumulating genes, including gene sequencing and subsequent high-level expression applying appropriate vectors and organisms.
Getting started: this picture was taken on our first day in the lab. First steps of cultivating our A. halleri.