Team:Greenfield IN-Rihm-HS/Safety

Our project this year is to design, create, and test a working cadmium water tester. We are going to do this by altering the existing biochemical pathway that Yeast has to recognize the cadmium, and then create our own code that will make it fluoresce red. When we originally had the idea for a water tester, we looked for metals, pesticides, and other harmful substances that are a problem in water supplies. Through much research, we found that cadmium is often a byproduct of many industrial processes, and is often leaked or exposed to the environment. Also, yeast recognizes the presence of cadmium already, so we figured it would be much more simple to alter an existing pathway than to create an entirely new one. We hope through research and experimentation that we are able to make cadmium much more detectable in the environment.