Team:HIT-Harbin/Background

As the size of human cities grows huger and speed of construction gets higher, a lot of environmental issues emerge. The price of large-scale cities is more living garbage and industrial waste. The main origination of dioxin, a kind of notorious persistent organic pollutants, is the incineration of solid waste and improper handling of chemical industrial emissions.

The toxicity of dioxin is 900 times of arsenic, entitling it as level 1 carcinogen and also “Poison of the Century”. Dioxin discharged in the atmosphere can be adsorbed on particulate matter, which could be absorbed directly or through the food chain to cause further harm to human body. Dioxin absorption may cause endocrine disorder, reproductive functional disturbance and even cancer.

As the awareness of dioxin raises among residents all over the world, dioxin pollution has become a tough priority of environmental issues of every country. Several protests focusing on dioxin pollution in community has been occurred in western countries. Dioxin malignant events also occasionally occur around the world. As a result, the detection and management of dioxin is particularly important.

At present, the detection of dioxin is not perfect enough. The mainly used method-- gas chromatography analysis has the disadvantages of high cost, complex operation and analysis, and low accessibility. Therefore, our team designed and implemented an genetic circuit with yeast as the carrier, functioning as a biological detector for quick and easy dioxin rough detection.