Team:Nanjing-China

Background

There are so many pollutants in the environment, causing great harm to both our health and survival of other creatures. The toxins range from metal ions to some organic substances.

Ions of Fe, Cu, Pb damages our environment vastly. The intake of Pb will cause birth defects, reproduction obstacles, osteoporosis etc. What’s worse, Pb is hard to handle, reducing life diversity. Excess Cu will cause gastrointestinal disturbance and liver or kidney damage. It also affects sense of smell in fishes. Fe may increase cancer risk and hinder industrial production. Besides, Cu and Fe are detrimental because they are everywhere and in large amount[ If you want to know some information about ion promoters, please click on: http://parts.igem.org/Promoters/Catalog/Metal_sensitive]. Lack of targeted solutions makes metal ion pollution hard to solve nowadays.

Some organic substances may cause greater damages. They include antibiotics, toxins from microbe and environmental hormone.

Tetracycline is one of harmful antibiotics. This antibiotic can increase risk of sunburn, produce resistance to drugs and disturb original flora in human body. There are already some ways to degrade this antibiotic, including reactions with light, water or strong oxidants. These ways are slow and inefficient. There also have been some ways to detect tetracycline, such as HPLC, ELISA. They are complex or expensive.

Microcystin is a toxin causing damages to the liver, and affect survival of some plants. Researchers have used HPLC, GC-MS, ELISA to detect the toxin and chemical or physical method to degrade the toxin. These ways have their own defects.

Environment hormones interrupt human hormone system causing problems of reproduction and development. People have use high temperature process and other chemical solution to detect them. There are flaws in these ways, too.

In a word, there have been a lot of toxins to be solved in the environment, which really needs efforts. Our project provides efficient ways to detect and handle the pollutants.