Team:LMU-Munich/Project

Project Abstract

Heavy metal ions of human origin contaminate waters worldwide and represent a major threat to human health, especially in lesser developed countries. The compliance with strict drinking water quality standards as a prerequisite to a healthy living requires qualitative and quantitative methods for monitoring metal ion concentration. Applying standard chemical methods is costly, complicated and sometimes requires high-tech machinery, which is often not available - especially where it's most urgently needed.

We therefore aim at creating a set of bacterial biosensors for some of the most toxic heavy metal ions found in drinking water, by fusing metal-responsive promoters under the control of transcriptional regulators with reporter genes such as GFP. The biosensors will be evaluated to qualitatively determine the metal ion specificity and subsequently quantitatively describing the concentration-dependent output of the reporters. Such a tool kit can be applied to quantify the metal ion content in water samples in an easier and cheaper way.

Detailed information can be found here!