In the future, we could imagine our bacteria inside of a hollow fiber bioreactor as part of a water treatment plant. The contaminated water would flow through and the high metal concentration would activate the system and our bacteria would start harvesting the pollutants. It could be coupled to a bio-sensor and then, when the Cadmium concentration threshold of our cadmium-inducible promoter is reached, it would elicit a visible colour change. We could also use bio-sensing in other ways; for example, to indicate that it is time to "harvest" our bacteria and replace them.

The cells could either be lysed by a chemical process or even induced to do so by a kill switch. The metal could then be recovered and sold for commercial gain making decontaminating water profitable!

In the future, we wish to investigate chelating other metals that are also found in waste water that have greater monetary value. Vanadium for example, could be chelated in a similar process to our system outlined above.