Team:Queens Canada/Project/Rationale

With increased media attention being given to the long term environmental effects of our current lifestyles, much public interest and research dollars go into “green” technologies and environmental sustainability. Reduced environmental impact on the Earth is being globally applauded with efforts ranging from community programs to government sustainability plans. While progress is being made, many processes relied upon by humans for a good quality of life have negative implications on the environment. Oil, heavy metals, chemical pesticides, plastics and many more substances produced by our industrial processes pollute the Earth. Many of these pollutants remain prominent in ecological systems, the native organisms of which are unable to degrade them or where they are absorbed to the detriment of the system. Human attempts at environmental clean-up-whether through mechanical intervention or chemical methods (for example, boom and skimming and burning or the use of dispersants for marine oil spills) remain both insufficient and inefficient. Relatively recently, microbes have been introduced as a method of biodegradation of environmental toxins and have shown huge potential for success. The iGEM competition provides a unique opportunity for research and application into this new territory.

The QGEM 2011 team was largely motivated by successes such as the use of the bacterium Alcanivorax borkumensis in bio-remediation, which proved that microbial biodegradation of environmental pollutants is a viable possibility. However, we wished to push the boundaries further, by creating a multicellular eukaryotic organism which could chemotax towards and breakdown certain types of pollutants. The potential for this kind of organism would be great, as it would have a broader travel range than microbes, would be generally safe to use, and could be applied to field assay tests (such as tests for toxins). A rather far-fetched but nonetheless intriguing point is that if the system was proven to work in a model organism (such as C.elegans), it is conceivable that it could work in other multicellular eukaryotic organisms as well.

Our team isn't the first to genetically engineer a bioremediation solution. And we certainly won't be the last.