Rationale: Why Bioremediation?
With increased media attention 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 when considering the environment. Oil, heavy metals, chemical pesticides, plastics and many more substances pollute the earth, many remaining prominent in ecological systems, the 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 with huge potential. The iGEM competition provides a unique opportunity for research and application into this new territory.
The QGEM 2011 team is largely motivated by such successes as with the bacterium Alcanivorax borkumensis, which proves that microbial biodegradation of environmental pollutants is a viable possibility, however, we wished to push the boundaries of possibility 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 range than microbes, would be generally safe to use, and could be used in 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.
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