Team:HIT-Harbin

From 2014.igem.org

Revision as of 12:00, 16 September 2014

Dioxins, by-products of various industrial processes, are commonly regarded as highly toxic compounds that are environmental pollutants and persistent organic pollutants. Its deleterious hazards intensify with the odorless, colorless and fat-soluble properties, which enable dioxins to accumulate in vivo thus threaten almost the whole biosphere. Considering their ablilty of causing reproductive and developmental problems, damaging the immune system, interfering with hormones and also leading to cancer, hand in glove with the difficulty of being tested, dioxins are worthy of the name “poison of the century”.

So as to detect dioxins blisteringly, we have constructed device for rapid detection of dioxins inside yeast. We utlized associability between the gene for testing dioxins of MOUSE as receptor and dioxins as antibodies, together with the regulation conducted by lexA operator to downstream promoters so that mdr and lexA are combined, and, striding a step further, induce downstream gene with the presence of dioxins. Eventually, we can achieve our goal of detecting dioxins rapidly through the system of positive feedback of flourescin. Concerning the properties of yeast, like non-toxic and able to survive in hypertonic environment, our project can be put into wide application in the field like food detection, hence guarantee the food safety among the community of we human beings.