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Project Description

Content

Heavy metal pollution in water is one of the most significant public health risks around the world. Pollutants including lead, mercury, and nickel can enter water supplies through a number of methods including improper disposal of waste, industrial manufacturing, and mining. These heavy metals are acutely toxic at high concentrations and carcinogenic with long-term exposure even at low concentrations, damaging both human health and the environment. Methods exist to remove heavy metals from water supplies, but these methods create other hazardous wastes and are more effective in waters with high concentrations of metals. Due to the high affinity of binding proteins, a biological-based filtration system would be more suitable for treating water contaminated with lower concentrations of heavy metals without generating large volumes of toxic waste.
Our team plans to combat heavy metal pollution by improving existing biological filtration methods and developing a novel system for lead remediation. To this end, we are engineering bacterial strains that will simultaneously express heavy metal transport proteins and metallothioneins (MTs), a class of low-molecular weight proteins with high binding affinities for various heavy metals. The heavy metal transport proteins are specific to certain metals and will cause rapid intake of these ions. Once inside the cell, the MTs will bind to these ions and permanently sequester them. After filtration, the respective heavy metals can then be isolated by recollecting the cells from the filter. In addition to developing these strains, our dry lab team plans to develop a hollow fiber reactor with several chambers, each one designed to collect a specific metal. We then plan to test the efficacy of different filter combinations in series using samples of contaminated waters near a local brownfield site.
Previous research groups have developed such filtration systems for some of the most harmful heavy metals. One of our faculty advisors at Cornell, Dr. David Wilson, has developed such systems for mercury and nickel. In addition to improving the efficiency and lifespan of his filtration systems, we will be developing a novel sequestration system for lead by utilizing a proposed lead transport protein from Nicotiana tabacum, commonly known as tobacco.

References

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1. Overall project summary
2. Project Details
3. Materials and Methods
4. The Experiments
5. Results
6. Data analysis
7. Conclusions

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