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From 2014.igem.org

Old routes – new ideas

Since 2007, 17 teams from 8 different countries have already chosen the problem of heavy metals in our environment as their topic. A total of 13 medals have been awarded in this subject area. This shows how relevant and highly topical the subject is. While other teams have concentrated more on detection and quantification, we want to go one step further with our concept of plant-based water and soil decontamination. We want to equip plants with a protein which binds several heavy metals at the same time and hence brings about a significant reduction in the heavy metal concentration. We thus hope to achieve more extensive binding of hazardous heavy metals than that achieved by conventional methods. More Background...

Our path to finding a solution

1. step: Transformation of Plants	2. step: Secretion and Immobilising	3. step: Quantitative Analysis

Our goal is to produce a Top4 Metal Binding Protein (T4-MBP) which attaches itself to the cellulose of the plants and binds four heavy metals of global relevance. We intend to use naturally occurring metallothioneins - proteins whose specific amino acid sequences alone make them able to form complexes with heavy metals. We have decided on the following heavy metals or domains and combined them to our first synthesis construct on the basis of the cDNA sequences:

The aim is to be able to use the protein in terrestrial (Arabidopsis thaliana) as well as aquatic plants (Wolffia). Since no-one has had much experience with the transformation of Wolffia, we decided to demonstrate the principle initially in the model organisms A. thaliana and Nicotiana tabacum. Our genetic construct is ultimately to be brought into the target organism with the aid of a transformation by Rhizobium radiobacter (formerly Agrobacterium tumefaciens).