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From 2014.igem.org

To celebrate iGEM’s 10th Anniversary and the upcoming Giant Jamboree we, the University of York team, wanted to focus on a global problem that affects millions of people in the world. Inspired by the ecological disaster of Portman Bay, Spain that lead to the release of up to 50 million tons of mining tailings into the Mediterranean Sea over 30 years, we aim to develop an effective treatment for the waste produced by the mining industry that has already been released.



We have found sulfates and heavy metals such as cadmium to be the most abundant and problematic compounds in the affected areas. The goal of our project is to engineer a strain of Escherichia coli to produce phytochelatins -binding metal peptides produced by plants, yeasts and others- in a metal-sensitive way to sequester the metal ions. In order to do so we plan to overexpress modified versions of endogenous E. coli enzymes that will enhance the yield of phytochelatins as well as the uptake of sulfates and the metals in question.



We will work on parts already present in the library and submit new ones both natural and synthetic ones contribution this way to improve the BioBricks catalogue. Moreover, the University of York 2014 team could be the first stone for a toolkit for targeting and sequestering specific metals in soil in a bioremediation context.