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Team:LMU-Munich/Project
From 2011.igem.org
Project Abstract
Metals and especially heavy metals are highly prescribed in concentrations in the drinking water ordinance. Qualifying and quantifying these by standard chemical methods is costly and complicated.
Bacteria sense metals in their surrounding in order to change their expression profile or react in order to adapt and accomodate to their environment.
Using these sensors from (mostly) bacteria we create biosensors by linking them to the expression of a reporter (e.g. green glowing by the green fluorescent protein GFP). To not only qualify but also to quantify the metals, it is also necessary to measure the output by given input (metal concentration) for each of these biosensors. Afterwards one can determine the metal concentration by measuring the output.
The quantification needs heavy high-tech machinery ... something not always given ... especially in free field. So a qualification of metals with an easy-to-see output is also needed.
In the end our team hopes to have not only a set of metallsensors for precise quantification of a group of (heavy) metalls, but also an outdoor kit for qualifying metalls in more remote areas. With these it might be more easy and cheaper to determine the content of metals in our drinking water.
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.
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.
